Kah Leong Poon: Mormon Photographer
Kah Leong Poon is a New York fashion, dance, art, and portrait photographer best known for his high contrast black-and-white portraits. In 2000 he opened his own studio. Previously he interned with Annie Leibovitz and Joyce Tenneson in 1995. He worked as Tenneson’s first assistant from 1995 to 2000.
His magazine clients include Elle, Essence, Uptown, New York Times, Psychology Today, Spirit and Flesh, Zink, Zoom, AndMen (British Magazine), and WestEast (Asian Magazine). His commercial clients include VH1, Fujifilm, JM Brand, Princeton University, Polaroid Corporation, Ernst and Young, The Propeller Group, Jefferson Hospital, J. McLaughlin, and London Fog.
Since 2002, he was won numerous awards, including several Graphis Awards. Polaroid, Communication Arts, the International Photography Awards, FujiFilm, the International Color Awards, Hasselblad, and Adobe, among many others, have awarded him for his work.
In 2012 Graphis named him as one of the Top 100 Photographers in the World. He has won several honorable mentions in the International Photography Awards. In 2017 he took first place honors in the International Color Awards. He was a finalist in the 2008 Hasselblad Masters Awards. In 2022, Graphis named his a master photographer.
Poon earned his BFA in photography from Brigham Young University where he was a member of the Ballroom Dance Company and the NCAA first division swim team. As a youth he held a 100-meter freestyle swimming record and represented Singapore throughout Asia in winning hundreds of individual and group medals. He was recruited by a BYU swim coach and, although he had never heard of BYU, he accepted the offer. He was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in February 1992.
At BYU, he also pursued classes in design.
Poon is married to artist Annie Poon, whom he met on a New York subway. They reconnected after her mission to Croatia.
