Ralph Steinegger

Ralph Steinegger was born 1976 in Zurich/Switzerland. As a teenager, he was obsessed with maps and later on almost became a cartographer. He always knew that one day he had to leave his Switzerland to discover the far ends of the world and moved to Brazil in his early twenties. Since then he has been living and working continuously abroad, in Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, New York, Istanbul, and now Singapore. His love for photography started with 19, but he only recently started to share his work with the public. He is using his analogue cameras to document mostly cities and show their contradictions, hidden sides, and poetry.

Surabaya, Indonesia

Manila, Philippines

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

(Dis)Orderly / Southeast Asia (2016-ongoing)

Whereas in the first half of the 20th century, places like Jakarta, Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Phnom Penh were small, pleasant, and orderly, they are now among the largest and fastest growing cities in the world. A transformation concentrated within a few decades, which has no precedent in human history. Richness and poverty, development and a lack thereof, enormous real estate and infrastructure investments, combined with a minimum of urban planning. (Dis)Orderly / Southeast Asia attempts to document the spectacle of the region’s urban landscape, the debris of its breakneck growth, the surrealist lure of its hidden street corners, the colors of tropical decay, and the intertwining drama of poverty and wealth.

Sihanoukville, Cambodia