Terence Teo is a freelance documentary photographer based in Singapore. A former ad man and teacher, Terence quit the beaten path at the end of 2003 to pursue his love of photography.
For six years, his focus had been on disasters. In January 2005, he was part of a team sent by Mercy Relief to the tsunami-devastated city of Meulaboh in Aceh, Indonesia, to help clean up and repair one of only 7 of the 153 schools still operational in preparation for classes to resume the following week. Images from that mission have been shown at the Esplanade and The Atrium@Orchard from March to April 2005 as part of the Glimpses of Light series of exhibitions. They have also been published in SALT, a bi-monthly magazine of the National Volunteer & Philanthropy Centre (NVPC), Asian Geographic and distributed worldwide by Redux Pictures. He has since been to several relief missions with Mercy Relief, to Nias, Muzaffarabad, Vietnam and Sichuan. His images from a shoot in Phuket in September 2005 were used in a 2007 book, Heart Of A Lion, to commemorate the second anniversary of the tsunami.
In October 2010, Terence’s first solo exhibition, entitled soliloquy opened in The Objectifs Gallery. The images from the show were a culmination of two years of planning and a lifetime of searching for inner peace. Tired of the seemingly never-ending series of natural disasters he covered, he sought and found, after 50 days and thousands of kilometers, a different side of nature in the varied landscapes of Japan.
In his spare time, Terence takes long rides on his motorcycle or writes screenplays for movies that will never be made.