Liyana Kassim

Liyana studied architecture and spent six years in a practice in Kuala Lumpur, mostly drawing staircases. She bought a second-hand medium format camera in 2014 to photograph the buildings she was supposed to be measuring, and found she preferred the photographs to the drawings.

She moved back to Ipoh in 2017 and has photographed full time since. Her work is about how places are made and unmade: the coast that the tide rebuilds twice a day, the shophouse fronts repainted by three generations of one family, the concrete halls of the 1960s that are now being quietly demolished.

She works almost entirely in series of six to twenty photographs, each made over two to six years. She does not use drones, does not replace skies and does not remove signboards or people after the fact. If something is in the way, she comes back another day.

A day in the field usually means two or three frames. Liyana scouts on foot, often for several visits, and marks tripod positions with a GPS so she can return to the same spot in a different season.

Files are edited and printed in the studio by her and one printer. Every print is checked against the previous one in the edition under the same lamp before it is signed.

Workshop: four days, eight people, in March and September. RM 2,400 including lodging in Ipoh. Join the list