From the Dalai Lama, to locals in Kensington, Mathias has snapped them all

When it comes to taking photos, Mathias Heng knows a thing or two.

The Dalai Lama, Aung Sang Suu Kyi, Bill Clinton and Robert Mugabe are just some of his more well-known clients.

While he used to live in Melbourne, Heng now works as a freelance photojournalist on the COVID-19 frontline in Singapore, simultaneously chipping away at a myriad of other projects including a documentary on global Shamanism.

And although Heng prefers to work wherever the wind takes him, some of his most famous photos were taken right here in Kensington.

Back in 1995, Heng took a series of photos, now enshrined in the State Library Victoria archives, documenting the lives of people living in the Kensington Public Housing Estate in Derby St.

They capture a moment in history when parts of the estate were being demolished to make way for a combination of public and private low-rise housing, a government initiative to improve liveability.

Heng still remembers the stories of upheaval and survival from the residents he talked to at the time.

“They were tearing the building down and relocating the residents there,” he said over a scratchy phone line from Singapore.

“I wanted to record history. I wanted to record migrants coming in trying to rebuild their lives coming from another country, and the Australians there doing it tough”.

To this day, Heng still keeps in contact with one particular man he met at the Kensington housing estate.

He was the father in a family which had migrated from East Timor looking for a better life, but who wished to leave the Kensington housing estate because of the heavy drug usage that surrounded them on a daily basis.

“As a migrant, he was really hard working,” Heng said.

“I’m a migrant myself, and I thought: ‘this is great, he wants to contribute, he wants to pay back what Australia has given him’, and that made me feel really good.”

“Some people don’t really care about their lives, they do drugs, or they push drugs.”

“This guy’s really appreciated what the government did for him, and he moved out eventually. Today, he runs a small store at the Queen Victoria Market.”

As construction progressed and the building became more abandoned, Heng said he encountered more drug users.

One of his most confronting photos depicts a 16-year-old boy injecting heroin into his own arm – a real moment Heng wanted to capture without censoring anything.

“Out of respect and privacy, I don’t usually shoot people’s faces out of respect, but this guy didn’t care,” Heng said.

“I said, ‘hey mate is it is alright if I take a photo for a documentary about Kensington? And he says, ‘yeah, no worries’.”

“All the photos were taken as they were, I don’t set them up. I don’t crop them. I want to capture the essence of them, the way they are.”

At first, Heng said people at the estate were reluctant to have their photos taken, but after a while, they came to trust him

“Once you get one family, they invite you in, word gets around and they trust you. Once they trust you, they welcome you with open arms,” he said.

Aside from his work in Kensington, Heng has travelled the world taking photos, often in the company of high-profile world figures including former US president Bill Clinton, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

He was even the official photographer for the Dalai Lama when he was in Melbourne in 1996.

“I was with him for five days,” Heng said.

“[He’s] just an ordinary man, treats everybody equally. I got really comfortable and felt like I could talk to him about anything.”

But other world figures were not as friendly.

Heng remembers being part of the press throng in Zimbabwe in 1996.

"It was rough meeting Robert Mugabe, the bodyguards would just push you and you’d go flying,” he said.

“I spoke to him, just a couple of words. He was a bit cold – didn’t like the media.”

For now, Heng is holed up in his Singapore apartment itching to travel once more.

When COVID-19 first hit, he witnessed and captured first-hand how Singapore’s migrant workers bore the brunt of the infections.

“Every day, 1000, 1500 workers were infected because they live in dormitories where it spreads,” Heng said.

“There can be 12 to 20 workers living in one room.”

At the moment, Heng said he was trying to expose as much as he could about the COVID-19 situation in Singapore, so people knew what to expect.

But in his down time, he is also working on a photojournalism project on Shamanism across Siberia, Indonesia, Laos, Indonesia and North America and Africa, where he was scheduled to fly out to before COVID hit •