Marjorie Doggett

Marjorie Doggett (née Millest,

In an interview by The Straits Times, she described how, as a teenager, she was taught the basic skills of film development and printing by a local chemist. Since then, she had continued photography on her own, compiling her first album in April 1940.

During World War II, she trained as a nurse at the Royal East Sussex Hospital. Despite wartime shortages of film, paper, and chemicals, she continued to pursue photography, bringing her camera "into the sterilized rooms to capture their drama".

Photography Doggett's photography matured in Singapore. Most of her prints were taken with a medium-format Rolleicord camera on a tripod to allow for slow exposures. Having no proper darkroom, she set up enlarger and chemical trays in her bedroom and washed films and prints in the bathroom. From 1954-55, she entered prints for the Pan-Malayan Photographic Exhibitions, organized by The Singapore Camera Club. She also made several expeditions to Malaya, photographing the eastern coast. There, she became acquainted with Ismail Nasiruddin Shah, the 16th Sultan of Terengganu and a pioneer of pre-war Malayan photography. It received positive reviews in the press and was praised in The Straits Times for being "exactly the kind of book that unknowingly we have been waiting for."

In the 1960s, Doggett played an active role in the public debate about colonial architecture and heritage conservation. She wrote three lengthy letters to The Straits Times, remarking that Singapore would "be poor indeed if, amongst all its dynamic modern environment and recreational activity, there is no place for the thinkers and 'dreamers of dreams."

The second edition of Characters of Light was published in 1985 by Times Books. The book jacket showed "Joshua", a Katong mansion near the Doggett's home in Amber Road. The new edition was spearheaded by Goh Eck Keng of Eastern Universities Press. Subtitled Early Buildings of Singapore, it was released in June 1985 with an initial print run of 5,000 copies. It was 46 pages longer than the 1957 edition and contained 28 more photographs. It also included an appendix for all the buildings in the book, sponsored by the Preservation of Monuments Board.

Published works A selection of Doggett's photography was published in 1957 by Donald Moore, a British-born book agent, publisher, and impresario. Characters of Light: A Guide to the Buildings of Singapore was the first photo-book to capture Singapore's urban landscape and the first of its kind by a female photographer. Seventy-nine photos, taken with a Rolleicord, were printed on wood-free paper with short essay captions from Doggett, presenting the buildings in their historical context. The book differed from its contemporaries in that it was not primarily concerned with Singapore's natural landscape or social conditions. Rather, the photos were products of meticulous research and formed a valuable record of Singapore's architectural heritage.

In Conserving the Past, Creating the Future, geographer Lily Kong wrote that Doggett's photo-book recorded "the beauty of the pre-war buildings at a time of impending change."

In 2019, NUS Press published Marjorie Doggett's Singapore, and Julian Davison's 2019 publication, Swan & Maclaren: A Story of Singapore Architecture.