Postbox Portraits is a photographic study of the humble letterboxes found across Singapore’s housing estates, shophouses, and apartments. Those small metal containers that quietly record the passage of time and the trace of those who live behind them.

Each postbox bears evidence of its own biography: layers of paint, tape, name tags, dents, scratches, locks replaced. Some are meticulously maintained; others hang open, taped shut, or scarred by years of use. Each box, marked by wear and repair, becomes both portrait and waypoint; a vessel of communication and reflection of its owner. Together, they form a visual language of human presence. Ordered yet personal. Uniform yet individual.

Through a psychogeographic process of walking and drifting, the project maps these letterboxes as waypoints of connection and exchange — humble vessels of communication reflecting the habits and identities of their owners. By photographing them as portraits, the project addresses the postbox not merely as infrastructure but as a symbol of connection and exchange. Every image becomes a form of correspondence, a letter to the unseen occupant, or perhaps to the city itself.

Printing the images as postcards returns these images to their original purpose as vessels of communication. In sending or receiving one, the viewer participates in a quiet loop of intimacy, a reminder that even in an age of instant messages and disappearing notifications, some forms of contact remain physical, slow, and deeply human.

'Postbox portraits is both document and love letter to the act of waiting, to the traces we leave behind, and to the silent witnesses that hold our everyday exchanges.