ERIC PERIS is the man who made black-and-white photography a serious art form in Malaysia. Born in Johor Bahru in 1939 to a family of artists, his father a Paris-trained painter who served as royal artist to the Johor Sultanate, his mother a dancer, he grew up watching people who made things for a living. He picked up a camera almost by accident. In 1969, an editor at a magazine called Fanfare handed him one and told him to go take some pictures. He never put it down.

Peris spent the next quarter century as a working photojournalist, ending his run as photo editor of the New Straits Times in the mid-1990s. Somewhere along the way, he stopped taking assignments and started making his own decisions about what to shoot. Nature took over as his main subject. Landscapes, light, shadow, the Malaysian countryside seen with a stillness few photographers bother to hold. His work is guided by Buddhist thinking, particularly the idea of impermanence, and it shows in how quiet and unforced every frame feels.

He's held more than 40 solo exhibitions since his first in 1982, received the National Art and Visual Gallery Award in 2013, and has sat on the regional selection panel for World Press Photo's Joop Swart Masterclass since 1995. In 2023, the National Art Gallery gave him a year-long retrospective, a rare honour for a Malaysian photographer and proof that his work has outlasted trend after trend.

Peris keeps a low profile and prefers it that way. He'd rather let the pictures do the talking. Once you've seen one, you understand why that's enough.