Biography

Ian Teh is an award-winning documentary photographer motivated by environmental and social issues. In an era of continuous urbanisation and development, his work explores the underlying dreams and desires of societies and the individual, and the sacrifices often made to realise them. In the age of the selfie, his panoramic series, Traces: Landscapes in Transition on the Yellow River, revisits the classical monumental landscape and sounds an alarm of terrible beauty, heralding the advancing threat we pose to our planet.

Teh has published three monographs, Undercurrents, Traces and Confluence. His work is part of permanent collections in the USA at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the Hood Museum. Selected solo shows include the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam in 2012, Flowers in London in 2011 and the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York in 2004. His current series on hyper-urbanisation and deforestation set in Malaysia's capital, The Line of Least Resistance, is supported by a 2023 grant from the National Geographic Society. Teh received the 2022 Silvana Foundation Commission Award, is a 2018 Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting grantee, and presented his climate-crisis-related work at the 2018 National Geographic Photography Seminar. 

Teh’s work has been published internationally in magazines such as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek and Granta. Since 2013, he has mentored at the Obscura Festival of Photography, Malaysia’s foremost photo festival, and from 2014 provided his time pro-bono at Cambodia’s Angkor Photo Festival. Teh is a member of the British agency, Panos Pictures.

He currently lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

My photograph of a forest canopy graces the cover of Jhumpa Lahiri’s new book, Roman Stories. Below in an interview with her in the Harvard Business Review: Is one thread common in all the writing you love and in your own work? “It goes
Another favourite, an image from an assignment for the Washington Post [WP] that I’m happy to see published (link in bio). Swipe left to see the complete panoramic. The article examines how China is absorbing Hong Kong and how its geography i
Another image from an assignment from Washington Post [WP] that I’m happy to see published (link in bio). Swipe left to see the complete panoramic. In 2018, a 34-mile bridge-and-tunnel system — the world’s longest sea crossing cos
I’m delighted to see my work for The Washington Post [WP] published — link in bio. Swipe left to see the complete panoramic. The article examines how China is absorbing Hong Kong, and how it’s geography is being altered to reflect
I spent three inspiring days in Banaue's lush mountains and renowned rice terraces with Philippa Forrester and the National Geographic Storytellers Collective. Swipe left to see more. We coached a diverse, dedicated group from around the world, unite