The award-winning sports photographer counts her incredible story as secondary in comparison to the stories of those she captures with her camera
In a time when photos can be made to tell an entirely different story from reality – social media is proof enough of that – Annice Lyn wants to uncover real stories. Unfiltered portraits of real people, real faces – the kind we pass by everyday but forget all too easily.
It's a noteworthy ambition that found a home in the KL20X20 photography project, where eight of Lyn's photos were shortlisted to be exhibited alongside other photographers and their interpretations of Kuala Lumpur in 2020. The subjects of her photos are people from different walks of life whom she has encountered, from her optometrist at Y.K. Leong Optometry Centre, known fondly to her as 'Uncle YK', to the shopkeeper manning the local confectionary shop near her home.
"Whenever I would travel to Melaka or Penang, what I loved most was meeting with long-time vendors and hearing their stories. After speaking with them, I'd often ask them if I could take their picture," says the 28-year-old architecture graduate.
"Soon I started shifting my focus to the areas near my house, to everyday people around me: the uncle selling pandan, the optometrist I visit to get my glasses fixed – people like these are such fixtures in our lives but we never really take the time to understand them."
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As it turns out, having an eye for capturing places and situations often overlooked by others was a highly useful skill when she started photographing figure skaters in 2015. Of course, her background as a national figure skater was also advantageous, as were the close relationships she had formed with parents of the local ice skating community.
What started as a simple request to her former coach to photograph his skaters soon became a much bigger project than she could have ever imagined.
"Back then, I shot with my Canon 550D camera with a standard kit 18-55mm lens. I used it mostly to shoot behind the scenes photos, the kind of shots I would have liked to see more of when I was a figure skater. My photos of skaters on the ice didn't turn out that well, but it was the behind the scenes photos that really caught the attention of the parents.
"Most people only saw that two to three minutes in the rink, not what went on outside of it," she adds.
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The Malaysian Ice-Skating Federation (then known as the Ice Skating Association of Malaysia) soon took notice of Lyn's work, and invited her to become the official photographer of the 12th National Figure Skating Championship and the Figure Skating SEA Challenge 2017 leading up to the 2017 SEA Games.
A year later, Lyn became the first female Malaysian photographer to be accredited for the 2018 Olympic Winter Games. It was here that Lyn realised the lack of female sports photographers, giving her the idea to create a space to empower more women in photography.
She relates some of the experiences that stood out to her over the years.