Martha Chaudhry

Martha’s portrait photographs and family art commissions have won accolades and multiple awards. Twenty years a commercial photographer in the Asia Pacific, her contemporary approach to business and family photography is rooted in storytelling and sought by clients throughout the region. As an artist, Martha’s raw material is mined from the existing global archive of images. Her most recent work explores the 1896 early photographs that illustrate the first edition of the International Cloud Atlas. Martha combines her skills in photography and fine art practice to create custom works of family fine art for clients incorporating their own photographic archives meaninfully into the work. Beyond family portraiture, these pieces interweave the journeys and vital stories of families or business entities, resulting in showpieces of deeply meaningful and personal nature. On these commissioned works, Martha collaborates with others in the creative industry on design and installation, to ensure a gallery-worthy art piece that assumes pride of place in a home or office. Martha holds a Master of Fine Arts (MAFA) from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore (Goldsmith’s London), holds licentiate qualifications with the Master Photographer’s Association (MPA) in the U.K., and trained as a photographer in the US, UK, Canada, Spain and Singapore. Her studio Martha Chaudhry Photography was founded in 1997. Martha has participated in many group exhibitions in Singapore, China and Hong Kong over the past twenty years. Martha believes her talents and work can be harnessed to assist others, and bring awareness to issues of social justice. Over the years she has used her professional skills to accomplish deep work in Cambodia in particular, as well as Singapore and Pakistan. In 2011 Martha was featured in Channel NewsAsia’s documentary series Asia Exposed 2, where her portrait and storytelling skills were employed to draw attention to the travesty of child sex trafficking in southeast Asia.

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Ensuring the safe-keeping of precious photo and video files has been helped by the advent of big data servers and 'The Cloud'. The reality of managing storage, and navigating the choices however, can be a struggle. Although cloud storage has become popular, difficulties and limitations of its use still remain. Large file sizes, duplications, upload speeds, ease of access, sharing and editing capabilities are some of the reasons many opt to hold their keepsake files in their hard drives instead.

We are all photographers and videographers now. At nearly every minute of every day, most of us are carrying powerful, high resolution cameras in the form of our smartphones, ready in an instant to record meaningful (and not so meaningful) moments of our daily lives. The result is a global glut of personal images, and our lives’ most precious memories literally held in the palms of our hands. 

For fellow consumers of news imagery, the past several days have delivered a particularly grueling daily diet of disaster photographs. Toxic explosions, inner-city bombings, unfathomable photos of institutionalized slavery, heart-wrenching images of the millions of desperate, displaced fugitives of war battered me vicariously each day of the past week. To be sure, the brave photojournalists who put themselves on the front lines of atrocity and danger to focus the world's attention all deserve our incredible gratitude and respect.

This week's selections seem to defy any single unifying theme. It is difficult to see where Todd Heisler's wrenching Memorial Day photograph of a pregnant widow lying by the coffin of her fallen soldier husband resonates with Antonella Arismendi's cyber-age, spiritual fashion photographs. Perhaps, this week's five amazing photos come together at the intersection of heartbreak and identity.