SELECTED WORKS
A COLLECTION OF WORKS FROM 2021 - 2025.
1. for this from that will be filled
Going Nowhere, a film by Timothy Ng (2025).
Shot along the Seven Sisters coastline, the work traces a solitary walk through a landscape that outpaces its own silence. Each step unfolds as both endurance and refusal — a movement without destination. Against the world’s accelerating rhythm, the act of walking becomes a quiet disobedience, a way of remembering time at its original speed. Meaning drifts, progress falters, yet the motion continues. In this suspension between direction and delay, Going Nowhere locates freedom in persistence itself.
2. THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE
The Painter of Modern Life, a photographic essay and conceptual study authored, photographed and designed by Timothy Ng (2025).
Rooted in Baudelaire’s vision of the painter of modern life, this project turns toward the small deviations that define the present — objects that feel familiar until they shift, ever so slightly, out of place. Following the sensibilities of Wilde and Kafka, the work examines how truth often appears through misalignment, how the uncanny slips out when the ordinary drifts. Barthes, Calvino, and Woolf echo through the images in the way traces, rituals, and fleeting impressions hold more weight than clarity. In these subtle displacements, modern life reveals itself.
3. UNFOLDING STUDIES
Unfolding Studies, photographic invitations photographed and designed by Timothy Ng, produced in a small edition (2025).
The invitations are designed so the images don’t appear all at once. When folded, the photographs—whether of the blindfolded figure or the two individuals meeting in darkness—are reduced to isolated details, offering only fragments of a larger moment. Once unfolded, these pieces realign and the full scene becomes clear. This transition from disruption to cohesion is central to the concept: the image must be opened to be understood. By allowing the folds to interrupt and then restore the photographs, the invitations mirror the themes within the work itself—concealment, emergence, and the gradual way clarity forms.
4. THE CHEMIST
Broadway Tintype, a photographic studio established by Timothy Ng as a contemporary continuation of the historical wet-plate collodion practice, operating in Lower Manhattan (2023-2025).
As one of the pioneers of New York’s contemporary tintype revival, my practice moves deliberately against the pace of modern life. I hand-paint my backdrops, carve my own wooden stamps, build my frames, and study every detail of 1800s studio craft — from the way light was shaped to the chemistry that held an image in silver. Each decision rejects instant gratification, grounding the work in patience. In this slowed-down space, the smallest imperfections become part of the image’s beauty, and no two plates ever emerge the same; each carries its own temperament, its own accidents, its own unrepeatable truth. The tintype becomes less a return to the past than a reclaiming of slowness itself — a way of seeing that allows meaning to rise from the irregularities and details modern speed would otherwise erase.
5. PRACTICAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Practical Photography, a tintype manual and study authored and designed by Timothy Ng, produced in an edition of five copies (2024).
After years studying the forgotten instructions of tintype manuals, I began to write my own. Building frames by hand and painting backdrops in slow, deliberate layers, I reconstructed a 19th-century studio as a quiet refusal of the fast-paced world and a rebellion against the instant, frictionless click of the digital shutter. In reviving a craft that had nearly gone silent, I sought to make images tangible again—each plate a small argument for slowness, presence, and the value of creating something that endures.
6. STUDIES IN THE ARCHITECTURE OF MOTION
Cinema Vérité, A photographic and design composition by Timothy Ng, featuring INSITU, a capsule collection by Anson Li (2022).
This series explores how bodies shift between compliance and quiet rebellion inside spaces designed to control them. In the theatre, “Take Your Seat” becomes the counter-gesture “Take No Seat,” recalling Ruskin’s belief that motion resists structure¹, Thoreau’s critique of mechanical discipline², Baudelaire’s fleeting individuality³, Nietzsche’s sense of the body as a field of forces⁴, Emerson’s insistence on presence⁵, and the pressures on selfhood traced by Engels⁶ and Simmel⁷. Across red rows and steel walls, the line between spectator and subject blurs; each figure becomes both watcher and watched. In the elevator, every suit matches except one—Anson Li’s deviation cut traditionally but built from unconventional foam—inviting the viewer to “Notice What Others Overlook”: a single disruption capable of shifting the entire scene.
7. THE OVERLOOK
A Record of Passing, a photographic and conceptual study on the quiet tension of being observed, photographed by Timothy Ng (2021).
This project is a photographic and conceptual study on the quiet presence of surveillance in everyday life. The images follow unguarded movement through public and semi-public spaces, capturing figures from angles that feel slightly too distant, too elevated, or too detached to belong to the flow of ordinary vision. Each scene—whether a body crossing concrete, descending a staircase, moving through foliage, or passing along a strobe lit wall—carries a subtle tension between living and being observed. Rather than dramatizing surveillance, the work lingers in the quieter spaces where the familiar shifts under the weight of an unchosen gaze. The camera becomes an unseen witness, and the resulting photographs expose how the everyday becomes trace, how gesture becomes record, and how meaning rearranges itself when the moment is viewed from somewhere else.
© 2021