This portrait of a European man in a suit, leaning forward on a cabinet against an unnatural studio landscape was taken at the Chinese-run Pun Lun Studio, which had branches all over Asia including Hong Kong, Saigon and Singapore. Such studios set up by non-Western photographers were popular in the later decades of the 19th century. Well-to-do families and individuals, mostly wealthy businessmen, government officials and military officers, visited such studios to have their photographs taken. Photography was introduced in Singapore in the decades following the arrival of European colonialists. Early photography in Singapore consisted primarily of images for documentation and mass dissemination. Advancements in technology such as the advent of albumen prints (production of a photographic image from a negative) in the mid 19th century made photography a commercially viable sector in the Singapore economy.
