David Loh has five jobs: aerial landscape artist, entrepreneur, author, gallery owner, and publisher. He juggles these passions with his wife, Rebecca Lee. Together, they run a photographic and marketing consultancy (Elaton Asia Services), a publishing house (Elaton Publishing), and a fine art photography gallery (David ST Loh Images) in George Town, Penang.
With 30 years in the media industry – mostly attached to Reuters – as a photojournalist and editor, Loh is the creative backbone of the operation. His decades of experience working with evocative photographs led to plenty of highs for the business, including the publication of Over Penang, an award-winning pictorial book of his aerial photographs across Penang that sold 2,000 copies within four months. Their subsequent book, Simply Penang, showcased the vibrancy of Penang through its residents, festivals, arts and culture, and food.
Lee, on the other hand, handles the business operations and strategies. It was a natural fit for the seasoned marketing practitioner who has also led the operations departments of several companies in Singapore, where the couple was based for a few years before returning to Malaysia.
Loh and Lee explain to Asia Connects how they built a multi-faceted photography business from the ground up and leverage it to benefit community causes:
AC: It must have been quite a leap to build a business that focuses on fine art photography in Malaysia. How did you both decide to take this on?
Loh: We started Elaton in July 2018 to provide professional, quality, fine art photography. Our photographer friends always tell us that it is impossible to sell fine art photographs constantly. We are lucky we are able to do that.
Lee: Elaton was established the same year that we returned to Malaysia after living abroad for over 20 years. The years away has made us bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in rediscovering Penang as we made it our base. We saw local demand for fine art photographic prints as artwork through the fresh lens, but it was still a niche market, compared to the US and the UK, where the market has been well established.
Loh: In Malaysia, large wall art is common for commercial businesses, such as billboards. But we saw the opportunity in wall art for private companies and homeowners as well. This is especially true during the Covid-19 pandemic – people are spending more time at home and are looking to transform their living spaces. This is where Elaton fills the gap. Our specialisation is producing and installing high-quality wall art that can go up to 10 metres of wall space. We provide large, premium, panoramic, licensed and high-resolution images that can be used to decorate a space, creating a unique ambience.
AC: As you mentioned, fine art photography is still a niche space. How do you open up more opportunities for revenue and exposure?
Loh: Yes, we discovered that getting people to fork out money and appreciate fine art photography as much as they value paintings or sculptures is not a straightforward process. Just because you are good, or even the best, it may not sell!
Lee: The challenge of selling fine art photographs is that not everyone appreciates photography as art. It takes educating and spreading the knowledge about fine art photographs and limited editions. It also means we have to continuously think of new ways to sell our images and offer complementing services to our customers. This culminated in the opening of our gallery in early 2020. We established it to showcase our work in the form of wall art and digital canvases to help customers better visualise the various possibilities of fine art photography.
Our books, along with our limited edition photo prints, are still our most profitable arms. We often come up with innovative ways to distribute or customise the books. For example, we sell our Over Penang books at high-traffic businesses like cafes, restaurants, hotel souvenir shops, and even car repair workshops. We offer companies the ability to customise the dust cover of the book with their own image and messages at a fee. Beyond running a photography and videography service, we also hold workshops showcasing traditional crafts, such as shadow puppet making, traditional rice wine making, and structures in portraiture art. This is in line with the spirit behind our photography business, which is to preserve and conserve what’s around us, whether it is structural, natural or cultural. That is why, following Over Penang, we are now embarking on our ambitious Over Malaysia project, documenting our country’s nature, people, food, and more, one state at a time.
Moving forward, we have identified opportunities to expand our business in fine art storage, rent-to-own images, and working with interior designers to incorporate our fine art photography into their design.
AC: We understand that Elaton is also raising funds for community causes. How do you balance these social initiatives with the stretched resources of an SME?
Loh: After publishing two books, we realised that you could have many editions of the same book when you have good content. So, we decided to leverage this for a good cause. For example, we are running a fund-raising project for the 131 st Anniversary of the Methodist Boys’ School in Penang. Our pitch to them is to produce a commemorative book for the school with our Simply Penang book as the core, plus an additional 70 pages of content related to the school. Each page in the book is sponsored, thus we are on target to raise RM400,000 for them this year.
We also proposed another book project to a zoo, whereby we produce a book that costs half the book’s retail price. After running the numbers, we determined that even if only 1% of the zoo visitors buy the book, the zoo can already profit RM100,000 within six months. Then, when we reprint the same book, the zoo’s profits can double as there will be no more production costs, only the printing cost.
AC: Has the choice to start your fine art photography business in the state of Penang made any difference?
Loh: Well, the cost of living and starting a company here in Penang is affordable. But most importantly, the people here are warm and helpful, making it easy to nurture strong relationships. Within a short period, we have built a network of friends and contacts to promote our business effectively.
Lee: Exactly. It is thanks to this network that, within two years, we held solo exhibitions in Penang and Singapore, published two books, were invited to carry out projects similar to Over Penang in Myanmar and Australia, established Malaysia’s first fine art photo gallery owned by an artist, and so on. The community support also boosted our book sales – we sold 1,000 copies of Simply Penang before we went to print!
