On The Periphery

Marc Tan, founder of Studio Periphery, laments the importance of artistry and craft as it wades out. Together with RIMOWA, the photographer highlights ways in which creatives can interrogate and reclaim the gaze of quality.

- Manfred Lu

If you used to not think too often about photography, the past two years probably changed that. As our usual brick-and-mortar conveniences were replaced by online marketing and shopping, it was perhaps photography that mapped a visual guide to the happenings within walled-off cities and arsenal of empty businesses. A well-crafted image could produce the same, if not more, than what videos could; the smells of a perfume store, the heat of a solarium, or the soft carpets littered around a hotel lobby all by a well-polished, curated still image. It was opportune, but despite an increase in its awareness, photography is a craft we still take for granted.

While it remains a key aspect in any business, photography is often viewed as an expensive skill; much less an art but a more of a service. It is a sentiment that plagues most creative industries, where the vocational replaced the aspirational, and competition concludes through the battle of who charges the least.

The same can be said of RIMOWA; a German brand dedicated to perfecting what it means to innovate. It exists at a timely crosshair between two major focal points of the luxury and fashion industry — technical virility and craftsmanship. The former for creating one of the, if not the only, pieces of luggages in the world that are virtually indestructible and lasts a lifetime, while the latter is akin to the stories we embark on with it; moving around the world brimming with life. Its meticulous precision — in both the way the products work and the things we can make out of it — is functional luxury at its apex.