Category Archives: Black and White

Full Metal Jacket, Suejin Shin

This blog is a side project for me. First and foremost I am a working commercial photographer and a fine art photographer. Like many photographers, I am fascinated by other photographers’ work because of the ideas that it germinates in my own process. Photo-books are the primary means through which I do this.

Full Metal Jacket is not a photo book exactly; instead, it is a book of informal photographic theory seeking to tease out the cognitive and psychological elements underlying individual photographic processes. Suejin Shin brought together five photographers from different generations and different geographical locations with disparate working methods for a series of ten conversations over nine months. These conversations begin with a particular prompt and grow organically as the discussions unfold. From her introduction:

…the greatest virtue of art comes from raising questions. We began by talking shop, so to speak, about the concerns we share as artists using photography as a medium, swapping insights about our work and its limitations. We talked about what it takes to keep on producing work and why we are compelled to press on even when that spark is lacking. We asked questions to each other and found answers in ourselves.

Here then is access to the working thoughts of five of the best photographers and one of the best curators working in Korea today–or, for that matter, in photography anywhere. The photographers are Bohnchang Koo, Taewon Jang, Hein-Kuhn Oh, Oksun Kim and Sungsoo Khim. These names will be familiar to anyone who has even a passing knowledge of Korean photography. The work of most of these photographers have been discussed on this blog (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) or are in The Queue.

The book is broken into two volumes (supposedly sold together, though I purchased them separately from two different shops). The primary volume includes Shin’s introduction, a small portfolio of work by each photographer and three dialogs, one of which is broken into two parts. The book’s second volume is an English translation of the dialogs. The quarto sized volumes have softcover bindings with lightweight uncoated stock and very good reproduction quality. The design is simple and sparse–allowing the text and images to stand center stage.

The three topics of conversation are “Obsession: Where I Begin,” “Things That Dominate My Work 1 & 2” and “What Keeps You Working”. These three topics form a kind of operating manual for photographers. These are very much the topics that are central in books like Art & Fear, Core Curriculum or The Education of a Photographer, to name three that are on my bookshelf and ignore the dozens of others out there. What makes Full Metal Jacket unique is that it is in the form of conversations. This gives it a very accessible tone that makes engaging with the ideas under discussion easier.

This conversational form is engaging also because the reader begins formulating responses to the anecdotes being shared and questions being posed. One can feel the push and pull of personalities, too. I found myself at turns nodding and at others shaking my head. By way of example, in the first dialog abstraction and repetition are discussed. Oh says that, “Photography is an art form where where you take a very specific subject and make it an abstract theme by showing it repeatedly.” Shin disagrees with Oh’s use of the word “abstraction.” In my mind I reversed his assertion: that we take abstract themes and flesh them out by selecting, sequencing and showing very specific concrete subjects. That repetition is not making concrete subjects abstract so much as serving to make abstract ideas concrete. The discussion nudged me to consider not only how I might re-read Oh’s photographs but also how I might re-consider my own.

When I described the book I noted that each photographer presented a small portfolio of work or work in process. To this point, I’ve not mentioned these photographs because they are not what I feel is the driving content of the book. The photography is supplementary. It enlivens the conversation while grounding it in visual concreteness. Taewan Jang shows the work photographs that have since been published by Hatje Cantz as Stained Ground. Oksun Kim shows photographs pulled from the earlier Hamel’s Boat and some more recently published as The Shining Things. Sungsoo Khim’s portraits leave me flat while her tree studies are stark, haunting and ripe; they ought to be put into a book if they haven’t already. Oh’s “Portraying Anxiety” works are as fraught with emotional intensity as his previous portraits, though they visually blend with his Cosmetic Girls. I’d have preferred to see a larger selection of his in-process “2 Minute Portraits” that he discusses in the text. Bohnchang Koo shows a diverse range of photographs that highlights the full range of projects he’s working on and speaks about in the text. Objet 22, 2009 and Arm & Armor 03, 2010 are near polar opposites yet both wonderful and testify to Koo’s ability to assimilate anything into his personal oeuvre.

In most of the reviews that I write, I am seeking to place the work at hand into a cultural context and present a possible interpretation. This is the central functioning of criticism: to define what the work is and why it is of value (or not). In this case, Full Metal Jacket‘s dialogs do much of my work for me. I am, a bit superfluous, especially in regards to the second part of the critic’s job. I will close by simply recommending this book highly, if one can find it.

Full Metal Jacket
Suejin Shin with Bohnchang Koo, Taewon Jang, Hein-kuhn Oh, Oksun Kim & Sungsoo Khim
Assistant Curator: Youna Kim
Copy Editing: Jeongeun Kim, Kyoungeun Kim
Translation Korean to English: Yoona Cho
Design: Yeounjoo Park
Printing and Binding: Munsung, South Korea
IANNBOOKS
2013

A Conversation with Kyusang Lee and Misook Ahn of Noonbit

MNM: This is Michael Meyer, the publisher and writer of KoreanPhotographyBooks.com; I am sitting here with Lee Kyusang and Ahn MiSook of Noonbit Publishing Co. as well as my wife, Ji Young Lee who will be translating and asking follow up questions. Mr. Lee and Ms. Ahn, let’s start with the easy questions: what is the history of Noonbit and your background in photography. Were you photographers, or editors, or, before beginning Noonbit, did you come from another division in publishing?

Kyusang Lee: Originally, what we studied was Korean literature and writing. As you know, every Korean male must serve in the army, so I did too. After I finished studying I became an editor in a publisher producing art books. My wife, who is the chief editor… Continue reading →

A Conversation with Suejin Shin

Michael N. Meyer: This is Michael Meyer, the publisher and writer of KoreanPhotographyBooks.com; I am sitting here with Suejin Shin, who is the Creative Director of the Ilwoo Foundation, and a Research Professor of Yonsei University.

Suejin Shin: Right.

Jimin Han: And a director of Lamp LAB, brand-new [laughter].

MNM: And also with me is Jimin Han, who is translating for me and interjecting follow up questions. Suejin, let’s start with your background. You have multiple degrees in photography and in psychology. How did you come to bring those two things together? How did you come to use psychology as a lens to understand and expand upon photography?

Suejin Shin, Lamp LAB, Seoul

Suejin Shin at Lamp LAB, November 2014

SJS: My first major was psychology, and my second major was photography. I then got a master’s degree in photography and a PHD in psychology. My studies of photography were primarily in photographic theory. I’ve never intended to be a professional photographer. In studying psychology my focus was on vision, or visual perception, and Cognitive Science. I simply followed my curiosity in studying the two; I wondered what kind of feelings or thoughts people have when they see photographic images. It’s about what people feel when they see images. It’s about feeling, or the process of thinking. In other words, when they see certain images, they come to have certain feelings or thoughts. My main interest lies in where they come from.

Generally, the background fields of art theory are commonly art histories or something similar; so, many people wonder how psychology can be applied to these fields. I’m interested in photographic images, but it is the audience I observe in order to realize my interest.
Continue reading →

KID NOSTALGIA: Portraits of South Korean Youth, Park Sung Jin

Kid Nostalgia, Park Sung Jin, Cover

Park Sung Jin’s KID Nostalgia is a collection of sensitive, square format, black and white portraits of South Korean youth in school uniform taken between 2001 and 2009. The subjects are set center frame with side street or back alleyway urban scenes surrounding them. The portraits are roughly evenly split between waist up and full length views. The black and white is the soft gray of a subtle, classic aesthetic that doesn’t call attention to itself. The books uses a simple layout in which each portrait is presented individually on the right hand page of a spread.

Kid Nostalgia, Park Sung Jin, interior spread
With a few exceptions, Park’s subjects gaze directly through the camera towards the viewer. This gaze is direct but not confrontational. In fact, there is a kind of softness to this eye contact. While there are the outward signs of youthful rebellion–cigarettes, mussed hairstyles and punked-out uniforms, the youths’ eyes belie a certain reticence. They hold themselves with an awkwardness that suggests naivete or innocence. There is longing and insecurity. There is intensity, too; so much so that they seem ready to burst into flame. These cool kids smolder.

Photographs are of their maker as much as of what stood before the lens. The choices that one makes in selecting a subject, deciding how to depict and frame that subject and ordering the resulting pictures in series all are decided by and define the maker’s state of mind. Though born in Seoul (where many of these photographs were taken), he came to New York City in 1987 at the age of 17. In New York, Park found “a place where every conceivable race [lives] side by side, but they don’t actually mix… Instead they live within their own identities.” Park notes that Kid Nostalgia is, in a sense, his “trying to find [his] own forgotten roots.”

Kid Nostalgia, Park Sung Jin, interior spread One comparison that springs readily to mind when viewing Kid Nostalgia is with Hein-Kuhn Oh’s Girls Act. The subject matter is quite similar, and the black and white aesthetics are even similar. The photographs come from entirely different mindsets, though, and these differences are apparent in the details. In Park’s “남산동 2005” for an example, the camera has been fitted with a slightly wide lens and positioned at the subject’s eye level. This even footing grants an instant conversational familiarity and shows the subject within an environment. Oh’s photographs, such as “Jin-hee Han, age 17, 2003,” are shot from a low vantage point. The viewer looks up at the subject, who becomes monumental. Oh’s low vantage point and longer lens places the horizon low in the frame, minimizing the subject’s relationship to her surroundings by placing her against the relatively neutral ground of the sky. The lighting is different, too: Park’s light is soft and coming from behind the subjects; it is probably the filtered light of an overcast sky. Oh’s light is hard, directional and frontal–direct flash on axis with the Oh’s lens.

These subtle differences in how the photographers use similar black and white materials to depict similar subjects limn a critical divide between them. Oh looks outward with a critical gaze and a clear concept (both Girl Act specifically and in his work broadly) that is as direct and hard as the light in “Jin-hee Han, age 17, 2003.” This concept can loosely be defined as the way that social markers of identity both bind groups of people together but also alienate and limit those same people.In contrast, Park looks inward. His vision relies on his subjects being their “raw and fresh” selves. In fact, it is precisely his subjects’ refusal to play by the rules, their skulking about on the “periphery” that makes these kids such powerful avatars for Park. The soft light that suffuses Park’s photographs denotes a kind of romanticism–it caps the subjects of “남산동 2005” with halos such that one might read them as mischievous alternative saints.

Kid Nostalgia, Park Sung Jin, interior spread For all Park’s talk about his subjects’ rawness, the photographs are remarkably chaste. This is not Elle Perez’s ghettopunk and not even within shouting distance of Dash Snow’s Polaroids. These kids may be full of excitement and energy but that energy never breaks the photographic surface. Park treats the youth with incredible sensitivity but imbues them with a nostalgia that is unlikely their own. It is the nostalgia of someone looking back. One wonders how these kids might depict themselves.

Kid Nostalgia is, physically, simply appointed. It’s design is minimal and straightforward, mirroring the subtle aesthetics of the photographs while relying on them to carry their own weight. The heavyweight glossy dust jacket features the image “가리봉동 2005” on the front; the title, photographer’s name and publisher in English and Korean are on the spine; and a UPC code on the back. The book’s hardcover boards are a cheap glossy white with only the title and UPC code on the blindingly bare front cover and title, photographer’s name and publisher in English and Korean on the spine. The plates are nicely but not luxuriously printed on paper stock thin enough that a reader can nearly read the photographs through each page’s backside. The production quality of the book will not win any awards, though it does its job in delivering the photography simply and without fuss.

KID NOSTALGIA: Portraits of South Korean Youth
Park Sung Jin
Edited by Kim Kwangchul
Translation by Colin Mouat
Design by Gang Moonsik
Printed by Sinsago Hi-techj
propaganda press (site, contact)

Memory of 100 years – Chuncheon Branch of Seoul Jail, Ryu Eunkyu

One year ago I was writing about Ryu Eunkyu’s cheonghkadong, Village of the Sacred Cranes. Today, coincidentally, Ryu’s Memory of 100 years – Chuncheon Branch of Seoul Jail has come up in the queue.

Memory of 100 years is a slim paperback volume with a grainy black and white photograph of a nearly featureless expanse of a brick exterior wall wrapping around its cover. The title in white text is set against the photograph’s black sky. (My photographer’s mind notes the heavy handed red filter.) A black bar juts across the bottom of the front cover with the title repeated in Chinese and English; a small thumbnail size photograph of a guard tower is set in this black bar as well.

Like those in Village of the Sacred Cranes, the photographs in Memory of 100 years are shot in a gritty, black and white, small format documentary mode–though they take this aesthetic significantly further. The deep black skies, gritty texture and high contrast belie a highly subjective description of the former prison. This aesthetic choice both accentuates the textures of the subject while also romanticizing it. This romanticizing strikes me as counter productive; it creates a veil.

Ruin porn is all the rage lately, though Christopher Woodward might argue that ruin porn has been the rage for centuries. Decrepit, decommissioned prisons rank right up at the top of the contemporary ruin porn hierarchy. Functioning prisons generally hold less interest for photographers–though we’ll come back to Pete Brook’s Prison Photography anon. This is because photography of ruins is not (generally) about the subject. Instead, ruin porn is all about fetishizing the decay of structures and the ravages of time.

(A good counter-examples is Will Steacy’s Down These Mean Streets. While Steacy’s process has its weaknesses, his photographs of inner city decline are about the larger social issues of which the decay is simply a symptom. They aren’t fetish; they are protest.)

Memory of 100 years is ruin porn with a thin veneer of poetic historical gravitas plastered on top. It could be that understanding the essays (in Korean only) or captions (in Korean only) might push the ruin porn of the photographs into documentary, but I doubt it. The photographs are too loose–like snapshots from an hour long tour through an interesting historical building. Few of the photographs feel considered, only a handful suggest the passage of 100 years or tease out the trace of human experience left in that time. Mostly we see surfaces–worn and wearied surfaces to be sure, but still little more than light on surface.

Four photographs suggest alternative narratives that might have been made: 1. A tight view of the weathered door set into a narrow structure. To either side of the structure we see the prison walls beyond and a small square of sky above them. A single thin shaft of light cuts across the featureless facade of this structure from top left to bottom right. It leads the eye from the light square of sky down to shadow–it is like some kind of unmarked, perpetual sun dial. 2. Hand painted lettering in graceful brushstrokes is above a row of barred windows and below an upward thrusting roof line. The framing is off kilter. A large chunk of the concrete wall has fallen away and taken a chunk of lettering with it. 3. A slab of plaster or stone with handwritten text is nailed to a wall with rough square nails. Poetry? Exhortation? Psalms? Schedule? 4. A calendar from 1982 and two mimeographed pages are pasted to a wall. A grid of shadow, cast by a barred window, falls across them.

In these photographs time passes and artifacts, touched by the hands of men, remain. In these photographs are singular stories by which we can understand the greater history of this place. This shaft of light has been traveling across this surface for a century. Someone pasted up this calendar in order to track the passing days. It is this kind of attention to time and artifact that could have told a more nuanced story of the Chuncheon Branch of Seoul Jail beyond peeling paint, flaking concrete and weathered wood.

Illustrating one of the book’s two essays are half a dozen archival photographs of the prison in operation taken between 1909 and 1981. They put me in mind of Christian Patterson’s Redheaded Peckerwood with its deft weaving of artifacts, places and narratives in both historical time and present time; this is what Memory of 100 years might have aspired to.

Taking this thought further, I wonder what others might have made of this place and how others might have told this story. What artifacts might Bohnchang Koo have found and what might he have made of them? What unsettling details might Alyse Emdur have found? What spirits or ghosts might Kirk Gittings have teased from the architecture?

And, what does the present penal system look like? Pete Brooks’s Prison Photography doesn’t worry about the ruin of abandoned prisons; rather, it concerns itself with systemic personal ruin as part and parcel of the contemporary industrial prison complex. He gives voice to those buried away for years of their lives–or the entirety. This (unfair) comparison begs the questions: what documentary work could be done in the contemporary Korean prison system? Surely there are stories of passing time to be told in prisons at the height of operation, though there is likely less romance.

Ryu Eunkyu is a fine photographer. cheonghakdong, Village of the Sacred Cranes shows his ability to distill lived history in a place into photographs and to tell peoples’ stories. In Memory of 100 years, Ryu has been seduced by light and by texture and he has lost the thread of the story. For those who enjoy rough photographs of rough surfaces Memory of 100 years may please. For those who en joy a well told visual narrative, skip this title for Village of the Sacred Cranes, which is both a beautifully told story and a beautifully crafted object.

Memory of 100 years – Chuncheon Branch of Seoul Jail
Ryu Eunkyu
Tohyan Publishing
2010

Weed, Byung-Hun Min

Several years ago, my wife and I talked our way into a gallery in the Samcheong-dong neighborhood of Seoul that had just closed for the day. Ji adores the work of photographer Byung-Hun Min, whose work was on display at the gallery, and wanted to inquire about a print. She was ready to spend some money on one but was stopped in her tracks by the prices: approximately $20,000. Though the prints (from Min’s Snowland series) were breathtakingly beautiful, we bought a couple of books instead.

Weed was one of those books. It is understated. The beauty of its design trickles down to the smallest details. Thought it would be wrong to call this book a masterpiece, it is masterfully done. The selection of photographs and their presentation is a nearly perfect encapsulation of Hun’s photography. The photographs in Weed do not present an overview or retrospective of Min’s oeuvre. Rather they are a singular and specific project from which the entirety of his photographic pursuit can be extrapolated.

Weed comprises photographs of weeds that Min made during daily morning walks over a five year span at his studio on the outskirts of Seoul. Just as the weeds sprout from whatever unlikely crevice they can gain purchase on, so too does Min find opportunity in an unlikely subject. Weeds are not Bae Bien-U’s majestic pine trees through which ancient echos reverberate nor even Min’s own haunting, minimalist, grand landscapes. These are simply everyday weeds behind the plastic sheeting of greenhouses and poking through the cracks of concrete walls. They are as quotidian a subject as one might imagine. And yet, Min makes of them something far greater.

Two photographers out of the Western canon come to mind: Karl Blossfeldt and Harry Callahan. They have nothing to do directly with Min’s photography. They come out of entirely different traditions but provide several counterpoints from which we can better understand Min’s Weed.

Blossfeldt’s 19th century photographs grow from the seeds of 18th century scientific observation. His methodology for photographing natural plant forms was rigorous. Plants were each photographed in profile against a light gray background. Everything is in focus and sharply rendered. They are highly factual. According to a press release from the Whitechapel Gallery regarding an exhibit of these photographs, they were used primarily as teaching tools until Blossfeldt published them as the seminal Urformen der Kunst in 1928. The minimalist compositions were intended entirely in service of the subject being most clearly described.

The minimalism of Callahan’s mid-20th century photographs is entirely different. His work is less about the subject than the medium through which it is seen. A plant seen framed against the sky and a portrait of the photographer’s wife are equally austere in their reduction of photographic form. Callahan reduces and reduces and reduces towards the limits of photographic representation.

   

Min’s photographs do not operate in these ways. While his routine of daily photography might have an echo of Blossfeldt’s rigor, he is not concerned with factual recording primarily. And though he might reduce compositions to their minimum as Callahan did, Min allows a struggle between his subject matter and the form of their representation. Rather than set his weeds before a neutral ground, Min allows the ground to come to the fore. The weeds press and push against not only the plastic sheeting and through the concrete walls but also against and through the bounds of the photographic surface. The edges and surface imperfections that were the hallmarks of Polaroid Type-55, which Min has employed for much of this series of photographs, blend with the surfaces and weeds which are depicted within the emulsion.

Blossfeldt may have seen the plant as an artistic structure complete in its own artfulness, but the nature that produced that artfulness is buried by the process of representation. Nature has been made clean and neat. Likewise, Callahan created photographic playgrounds that subverted the subject by their representation. In their extreme reduction, the photographs were about their own form as much as the subject depicted.

Min’s photographs embody the fervor of life. The division between form and subject begins to break down–as though the weeds themselves could break forth from the photographic surface. They do not submit themselves to their representation but instead struggle mightily against it as they struggled mightily out from between mortised stone or against a greenhouse window.

The design of Weed is simple in its presentation of these photographs. There is enough struggle within the photographs; to struggle against overbearing design would demean them. Any treatment other than simple would have been inappropriate. The photographs are presented generally one to a spread with the image on the right hand page and a negative number as caption on the left hand page–though there are several spreads across which two images square off. The dominant color is gray: gray cover, translucent gray title page, gray text and gray photographs. The reproduction of the photographs is extremely true to Min’s low-contrast, gray printing style. The design choices are an extension of this photographic style. (I make this judgement based on prints from the Snowland series I have seen and the reproductions of those images in a sister volume to Weed, Snowland.) My one complaint is that the images are small, only slightly larger than a contact print from a 4×5 Type 55 negative.

Though the subject matter of Weed is outside the core of my photographic interests, I find it fascinating. In looking at the photographs I find new questions for my own photography and my process. I look at my own photographs and consider the interaction of form and subject. I look at familiar photographs from the canon and consider them anew. I might not live with one of Min’s prints on my wall, but his photography is ever present. Min is a photographer’s photographer and produces photographs full of insight and grace.

Weed
Byung-Hun Min
Homi Publishing House
Book design by Creé Associates
Printed by Munsung Printing Co.
2006

Bright Shadow, Sohn Sung Hyun

Bright Shadow opens with a photograph of the Mongolian steppe. The horizon line is low in the frame, marked by mountains in the blue distance. The brown of dry grassland stretches out to meet the mountains. The land is receding; it is falling out of focus. A cloud filled blue sky dominates the picture, or would if a pair of truck mirrors in the foreground weren’t breaking the frame. The mirrors mar and distort the steppe caught in their surfaces.

We come to the city. It is seared by sunlight. The sky is blue and dark. There is no ground; buildings seem to sprout from their own concrete. A billboard advertising an apartment complex, still under development, promising elegance and luxury, dominates the photograph. We are in Mongolia.

A bolt of yellow: a woman in a yellow shirt and large white sunglasses is transformed by the photographer’s flash, which overpowers the sun. The background is dark (a trick of balancing the ambient and flash exposures in favor of the flash). More portraits of people picked out of their surroundings by the photographer’s flash follow: a middle aged, large bellied, man in a dress shirt; security guards; a young man with a hip haircut and popped collar; three young women, one looking away; two soldiers in their fatigues; a rancher in his chaps; construction workers; businessmen (or gangsters). The portraits are full of strong color and hard light. They bring to mind Hein Kuhn Oh’s ajumma portraits as well as Philip Lorca Dicorcia’s strobe lit street portraits and Bruce Gilden’s aggressive street photography.

The portraits are interrupted by a series of full bleed double truck urban landscapes in grainy black and white. Cars commingle. Cranes loom over rising buildings. A fountain’s spray dissipates into a gust of wind. The flash lit portraits continue: a man in uniform; a young man, hip; a young couple; a boy and a teen.

And then there comes a break: a black and white portrait of a young girl in some sort of costume–Mongolian? Korean? Play?. A second black and white portrait follows: an older, heavy set Native American woman with blotchy skin and thick fingers. Another portrait, this one in color: a Native American woman (neither young nor old) who looks away from the camera. We return to black and white: another woman, cropped tightly, her collar bones and upper chest are bare. And then color: a stark portrait of a Korean woman wearing a nurses uniform sitting before an off-white wall and staring intently into the lens. Three Korean boys look uneasily into the camera. A Mongolian family, four people covering three generations, stands on a plaza before what appears to be a government building; they stand erect. The husband’s face is marked with anxiety; he pulls his son in towards himself. The son looks off to his left away from the camera. The mother smiles; there is pride mixed with bemusement. The grandmother, leaning on her cane, wears a traditional costume with two government medals pinned to it. She looks towards the lens but not into it–perhaps she is looking beyond it. This family is followed by a group portrait of Korean healthcare workers; or maybe they are Mongolian.

The book ends with a final portrait: a tightly cropped photograph of an older Native American woman’s softly lit, wrinkle-etched, face. Her eyes are moist. In them we see the photographer’s reflection.

Interspersed throughout the book are roughly printed pages with multiple black and white documentary photographs. They are not only of Mongolians but also of the Korean diaspora and Native Americans. They depict daily life, rituals, landscapes, and portraits. In these mash-ups Sohn plays his hand.

When I say that Sohn has played his hand, I mean that this book engages his broader interest in the historical, societal and economic stories of the Mongoloid race told through the visual arts. (This is paraphrased from his bio. As this parenthetical note probably makes clear, I am uncomfortable with the word “Mongoloid”.) Sohn’s work is interpretive rather than documentary. Though this book is ostensibly about the effects of rapid economic expansion in Mongolia, the mash-ups and closing sequence present tangential forays into origin myths, the Korean Diaspora, racial affiliation and historical or colonial injustices. How could one talk about the effect of rapid economic expansion without also speaking to these other ideas? They feed one another.

As noted in Kay Jun’s essay that concludes the book, Sohn is both a photographer and an anthropologist by training. His previous books, The Circle Never Ends and Close Encounters of the Fourth World, pair photographs with essays and seek to bring into the light the stories of Native Americans. In “Bright Shadow” Sohn drops all text and “attempt[s to] touch on [the] complexity of history of humanity only through the prism of photographed images” according to Kay. This is a particularly photographic endeavor, and one that steps away from an objective stance. This is apparent from the first image of the out of focus landscape that comes into focus in the mirrors’ reflections. Though in focus, this reflection is distorted by the curves of the mirror. With this opening, Sohn is stating that he is no more objective than the mirrors. His perspective and his interests inform (or distort) what is before his camera.

Sohn is entirely transparent in this. His camera is not invisible. Instead, it makes itself known in the pop of the flash. The portraits are stories that build within a larger Story. When we come to the crux of the narrative, rapid economic development creating unforeseen societal consequences, we shift into black and white. Our world goes gritty. When we’re following his free associates between parallel stories not only does the aesthetic style shift into a traditional documentary mode but also the paper selection, printing and design shifts. These shifts are too rapid in the final sequence where they feel awkward, heavy handed. I find that the ending presents a tangle compared with the puzzle that the rest of the book puts forth.

As an object, Bright Shadow is lovely. It’s cover boards are beautifully wrapped in some kind of rice (?) paper with metallic flecks. The cover is bare except for the Aprilsnow Press logo embossed in the lower right corner. The photographer’s name, the book’s title and the publisher’s name are embossed on the spine. The printing quality is very good. The design is sparse and yet entirely appropriate to the themes that run through the book. There a few design flourishes such as the red, yellow and black ribbon page markers. Kay’s essay is enlightening, if not perfectly translated. There is a discussion between Sohn, Lee Young June and Kim Nam Soo, as well, though it is not translated into English.

Much like Jaeyu Lee’s Fragments in Scene, I find this book a wonderful agglomeration of anthropological process and visual communication. While it is highly conceptually driven like much contemporary Korean photography, Sohn’s integration of cross-practice methodologies and reliance on purely visual storytelling (leaving aside Kay’s essay and the discussion) gives the viewer rich opportunities to make broad connections and find their own insights from the work. It’s conceptual drive is expansive rather than reductive. In the end, this overwhelms the book, which falls apart in its final sequence. None-the-less, it is an interesting and engaging book.

Bright Shadow
Sohn Sung Hyun
texts: Sohn Sung Hyun, Lee Young June, Kim Nam Soo, Kay Jun
Edited and Designed by Kay Jun, Jeong Jae Wan
Proofread by Kang Young-gyu
Translated by Angelina Gieun Lee
Transcribed by Lee Hyunsong
Printing and Binding by Munsund Printing
Published by Aprilsnow Press
2013

Portraits of 77 Literary Persons, Han Young-hee

Straightforward, subject driven, simply lit black and white photographs of the real world and the real people in it are not in vogue. Han Young-hee’s Portraits of 77 Literary Persons doesn’t change this. Han is an old school newspaper photographer. He began his career at the Hankook Daily in 1972 and moved to the Chosun Ilbo in 1981. The portraits in this book were made in the last two years of the 20th century, and the book was published in 2001.

These photographs are unlike Stephen Pyke’s Philosophers, Avedon’s In the American West or Platon’s recent portraits of power. They are also unlike JeongMee Yoon’s Pink and Blue Project or Kim Gang Sil’s Off-Line project. There is no singular style to unify the portraits. Rather, they are united in their subject matter, writers, and the humdrum daily spaces from which these people craft their words. There is little artistic ego but much delight. Han clearly enjoys being with his subjects and making these photographs.

The publisher’s website describes the Han’s portraits as being of “everyday surroundings of authors where their literature originates…the studies where they write, houses and rooms where they live in, and surrounding natural environment that gives birth to their literary sentiments.” The publisher calls the writers “representative;” one can assume this means that they are from a cross-section of genres, styles and generations.

In his introduction to the book, the poet Hwang Ji-u states that Han’s photographs display “a constant aesthetic intention to be something more than plain photographs of writers’ faces to be used for the press.” Too often, the photographs instead feel like unconsidered snapshots. Perhaps the plain photographs of writers’ faces might imbue a sense of the iconic and instill a kind of reverence. Han’s photographs point to the banality of creativity. The portraits rarely make me wonder who these people are and what wonders their pens produce. I do not feel the weight of genius.

Clearly these portraits are meant for posterity, primarily. The writers are Writers. The value of the photographs and of the book as a whole is as historical document. There are a handful of photographs that rise above the rest, that work as portraits and as photographs.

Park Kyung Ri looks out of the frame. Her hands cover her mouth as though she is trying to hold back some thought–or perhaps she just wants to hide her mouth. Her cotton shirt blends softly with the gray background.

Park Wan Suh, wearing a cone shaped hat, squats in the grass. He is trimming the grass with a pair of scissors. It is unclear if he is illustrating a point, making a joke or simply engaging in daily routine.

Yang Gui Ja sits serenely on a throne–actually, a pile of plastic chairs. The frame is filled with plastic chairs stacked on a walkway. She looks across the frame, her hands folded demurely in her lap, her legs crossed and her feet a foot from the ground. Her black dress forms a dark void that offsets the geometric lines and shapes repeating in the stacked white chairs.

Yang Sung Oo sits on a stone step before a white door. The door’s glass panes reflect bare tree branches against the sky, a church (?) and the edge of the awning or gable beneath which he is sitting. We wears a dark coat and a paisley scarf. His hands rest in his lap; one hand gently holds the index finger of the other. He has a slight smile and looks out at something just to the left of the camera. I am reminded of Paul Strand’s photographs from Vermont.

Lee Moon-koo stares at the camera. One arm is folded across his chest and rests in the crook of the other, which holds a cigarette, outstretched fingers against his cheek. He holds himself with an air of both authority and insouciance. He is wearing a cap and a dark coat over a striped dress shirt. Around him pedestrians are blurred as the negotiate their way around him. The novelist is still.

Lee Jae Ha sits in a folding chair center frame. Han’s wide angle lens takes in the writing table with two computers and stacks of papers off to Lee’s left and the framed, piled and half finished artworks on his right. Light pours in the glass door behind him; a clock is on the wall above it. Lee looks away from the camera; his left leg is crossed over his right; his left hand holds a cigarette; a sandal dangles from his left foot.

Chong Hee Sung sits in the midst of rows of grade school desks. The slightly downward and oblique camera angle turns the desks into a skewed grid crossing the frame. Chong’s right hand rests on the desk in front of him; he leans back slightly onto his left arm, its elbow on the desk behind him. Middle gray dominates the tonal scale; soft light from the right of the frame illuminates Chong, and he looks towards it. His expression is measured, thoughtful perhaps.

In images like these and a handful of others there ate the threads of narrative. The viewer is given material with which to weave an identity for the subject of the portrait. (I am making the leap and the assumption that the descriptive threads are apt.) In these portraits the “consistent aesthetic intention” is evident and the importance of the sitters apparent.

The book, as a whole, works wonderfully as an historical document of the Korean literary scene at the end of the 20th century. A number of the photographs stand on their own as richly appointed portraits that convey a psychological measure of their subjects. In these photographs, the everyday surroundings are indeed suggestive of their literary sentiments. The great bulk of the portraits do not rise to this level; they are rather humdrum snapshots that are elevated solely by the elevated status of their subjects.

If one’s shelves are filled by photography books with a slant towards portraiture, Han’s photographs will likely underwhelm. If one has a love for Korean literature and shelves filled with that literature then Portraits of 77 Literary Persons would be a fascinating addition to those shelves.

77 Portraits of Literary Persons
Photographer: Han Young-hee
Essay: Hawng Ji-u
Publisher: Youl Hwa Dang
2001

Documentary 1985-2005, DongPhil Shin

This review is late. Not because it was supposed to be last week’s missed post (or yesterday’s for that matter) but because I had intended to write about this book back in June immediately after the post on On The Line. That post was published the weekend that Memorial Day was observed here in the United States. On the Line‘s examination of the lasting impact of the still simmering Korean War presented photographer’s observations of the political, social, cultural and personal effects that the war has had.

While it is important to acknowledge that military conflict has a role in shaping the world (in a larger sense if not an immediate personal sense) and to acknowledge those who form these militaries, it would be a mistake to forget that there are plenty of tumultuous non-military events, national, local and personal that have shaped the current state of the world and more locally of Korea. Not all of these events are military. Some, certainly, are tied to the branches that spread from military conflicts, but many more are tied to broad struggles for individual autonomy and opportunity within national and local politics and economic structures. Much of this struggle has been by ordinary people, united.

DongPhil Shin has traced the buds and branches of social upheaval that has marked Korea over the past decades. Documentary 1985-2005 brings together 5 discrete projects plus an overarching view of street protest in Korea in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Throughout these projects is a sense of the individual’s role in shaping larger narratives. At the root of any confrontation, social change or economic shift are individuals who march in the streets, pull lumps of rock from hillsides, maintain and affirm that “this is what I believe” or simply live their lives day by day.

Shin’s photographs are starkly documentary in form while constantly laying bare his own social and political views. At first glance they would appear to be pulled from newspaper or magazine articles (and indeed they may have first been published in these outlets). They are, however, more than simply journalistic images meant to feed a hungry and fickle press. Shin studied philosophy before studying photography. His photographs are intensely personal and mine a deeper emotional current that runs beneath their surface and of the social fabric which they depict.

Bong-Lim Choi, in the book’s introductory text, describes Shin’s photography as “evocations of the imperialism, capitalism and authorization [sic] rules that completely deprived the public of their individual life [sic].” His photographs are angry even when they are quiet. Taking the “suffocating age of oppression” as their subject, the photographs depict those under the boot of history taking defiantly to the street or maintaining a quiet quotidian dignity through their suffering.

On the flap of the dustjacket is a portrait of Shin. He gently cradles his Mamiya 7 with Metz flash against his chest. A Contax G2 hangs from his shoulder. He stares coolly out at the viewer. A two tone wall is behind him–though half of it dissolves to nothing. His face and clothing is covered in the soot of the street. The portrait perfectly encapsulates Choi’s closing thoughts from his introductory text: social engagement is critical to Shin’s sense of humanity and that his photographs adopt an ideological standpoint shared by, in his view, the majority of our society. Shin’s photographs are as much participants in the upheaval that they depict as they are a documentation.

The book begins and ends with photographs of street protests–both close and personal and pulled back to abstract crowds. These opening and closing images announce Shin’s intentions. The five projects book ended by these sets of street protest photographs bring into focus personal stories that lay bare the wounds inflicted by an imperfect world; it is this world that the protests are aiming to change for the better. (Nearly a decade on from the last image being made, there is a fair debate to be had on whether or not the improvements sought have been achieved and what opportunities, if any, were missed. This review will steer clear of making any such historical judgement.)

The five series are: People Who Didn’t Change Their Political Faith and Went Back to North Korea; A Coal Town; A School in Japan Run by the Pro-North Korean Residents’ League in Japan; Korean Victims of the Atomic Bomb; and The Korean Residents in Kyoto. One photograph from each:

People Who Didn’t Change Their Political Faith and Went Back to North Korea: A elderly man lays in bed en-robed in quilts, blankets and bedding. A pool of light, like a death mask, illuminates his face, catching on the gray hair at his temples and his white beard. His clothing has fallen off of his left shoulder, which is bare. He looks up and out of the frame. It is hard to read his emotion: disappointment? expectation? hope? stoic resignation? regret?

A Coal Town: A man sits eating lunch. He is shirtless. A yellow plastic miner’s helmet is perched on his head, its lamp illuminating his lunch. The flash of the camera separates him from the dark tunnel stretching out behind him. A pair of railroad tracks lead back into the gloom. This could be any ajashi anywhere in Korea taking a break for lunch save for the setting. The darkness is all encompassing except the pool of light the miner sits in.

A School in Japan Run by the Pro-North Korean Residents’ League in Japan: Four students sit at their desks besides windows. The windows have been blocked with newspapers to block the glare of sunlight (?). The students are bent over school work that they are writing out in notebooks. Their bags hang beside their desks. There is light outside the windows, but it is muted, grayed, and blocked by the newspapers’ printed text. The light is mediated. (On the following page three students look out an opened window. It is not blocked with newspapers. They all smile at the photographer. One girl pokes her head out of the window and into the light, wind sweeps through loose strands of her hair.)

Korean Victims of the Atomic Bomb: An older middle aged man sits cross legged on the floor; he faces to his right exposing his left side to the camera. Behind him is a wall papered with a floral pattern. A soft gray infuses the photograph; a light from the right illuminates a scar that runs down his side. The man’s hair is disheveled. His eyes look down and away. There is stubble on his face. His expression is not pained but shows the trace of pain long endured.

The Korean Residents in Kyoto 1987 – 2004: a man, his eyelids heavy and drooping, almost closed, sits on a pile of blankets. His face is in luminous shade. He is warming his hands over an electric hot plate or small gas grill. A suit and white shirt are hanging on the pull of an armoir behind him. Through the glass panes of the door we can see towels or blankets. Kitchen utensils clutter the left foreground. From the right a draped window casts a soft gray light across the scene.

The protest picture that closes the book: Night time; a large public square seen from above. We are looking down on a field of myriad light sources–candles most likely. Each is held by a person though we cannot see the people in the dark of the night except a few silhouettes or along the periphery of the crowd where it comes beside a major roadway’s street lights. What we see is the light that they bring: hope, determination, belief, willingness to action.

As the world seems to be fragmenting and falling apart today before our very eyes in the newspapers and on the news channels, Shin’s photographs remind of us two things: it is real people who bear the brunt of suffering and it is the union of individuals acting in concert that brings about change. In the photographs light becomes a halo or a salve for those who have been wronged and points like an arrow so that the viewer might see. Light, too, is held by the individual and in the massing of individuals it fills the frame with light. DongPhil Shin wields his camera like a torch; he is not so much recording light as directing it with a political eye towards illuminating the imperialist, capitalist and authoritarian wrongs that the State has brought to bear on individuals. Shin shows not only the wrongs that have been wrought but also offers a path of action for ameliorating these wrongs–at the center of both is the individual.

Documentary
Photographer: DongPhil Shin
Essay: Bong-Lim Choi
Publisher: Cana Books
Copyright DongPhil Shin 2006

Addendum:
Collecting Side Note

While I usually shop for Korean photo books in Korea (obviously), I happened across this book in Alabaster Books, a small New York book shop on 4th Avenue. I was killing time between appointments and stopped into the shop on a whim. As I set down a collection of A.D. Coleman essays I noticed the Korean lettering on the spine of Documentary. I haggled a little with the proprietor on the price and then bought the book.

Flipping through the book later I came across a handful of details that lay out a provenance to the book that make it moderately interesting as a historical object, though they certainly don’t make it valuable.

Tucked into the title page is a shipping label. This copy of the book was sent by the photographer to the “Stefan Stux Gallery”. I assume the book was part of a submission by the photographer to the gallery.

Below the colophon is a stamp with a handwritten edition number (83/200) with a red stamp over this (it appears to be the photographer’s stamp). The quality of the printing suggests that the book was probably printed in a larger edition than 200 (though I could certainly be wrong), and I wonder if this book hadn’t originally accompanied a print as a sort of special edition.

At the back of the book, in the margin of the profile/C.V. of the photographer is a hand drawn self portrait of the photographer in ink.

It is discovering small details like this that make seeking and collecting fun.