Category Archives: Color

31 days 807.3km; Oh SeBeom

This book is an escape, and I need one. I am in Kings County Superior Court serving on Jury Duty. Thus far, I am doing little more than sitting and waiting. Having brought Oh SeBeom’s 31 Days 807.3km was a good decision as it provides welcome distraction.

31 days 807.3km is a small volume, roughly the size of a Moleskin notebook, chronicling a 31 day 801.3km trip across northern Spain. This book is one part of a larger project that includes web and video components as well. The project as a whole is one part again of Oh’s overarching one man project: World of DDanjit I cannot read any of the site’s text, but it seems to be a cataloging of the world, something to which I can relate.

31 days 807.3km is broken into roughly three equal sections. The first is a reproduction of Oh’s Moleskin journal pages written during the trip. It is from these journals that the book takes its size and shape, imitating a Moleskin notebook. This section has feeling. The handwriting has smudged and we can see text bleeding through from the backside of each page. As we read one experience we anticipate what is to come and reflect on what happened previously. This text is, obviously enough, in Korean with bits of copied text and web URLs in English. As I cannot read this text, I will say only that the reproduction of the notebook pages feels right; I feel like I’m being stealing into someone’s private thoughts (that were left laying about so I might buy them…). I assume that if I could read the text, this is what I would find, the starts and stops of experience.

The second section is a series of photographs that reprise the travelogue in visual form. The bulk of the photographs are landscapes; many are the well worn trope of a road or track receding towards the horizon. There are few people or buildings. The photographs are like walking: one foot in front of the other, slowly building into a journey of 807.3 kilometers. Several photographs do stand above and are absolutely beautiful in their atmospheric quality. One, in particular, grabs my attention: in the foreground there are mounds of dirt that look like Korean tombs but are nothing more than piles of fill, in the middle ground a line of trees extends halfway across horizon with the last few trees wind blown back, and in the background half screened by the trees a small town gives way to a blue horizon beneath a blue sky. The photographs are all horizontal, printed full page, two to a spread so that one must turn the book sideways to see them properly. There are two exceptions to this: a vertical of a church is run halfway (and could have been edited out) and the closing horizontal image of the sea that is run double truck also and forces the reader to turn the book back to its normal orientation. It is a nice transition.

The third section we return to text. Days, dates, locations and distances are in large blue lettering overlaid on top of background text describing the journey. Facts and figures; cold and hard. The design amplifies the content. We end with a blue map dotted with (Google) map pins.

We have three travelogues that reinterpret the same trip through different filters. We begin with the personal experience: direct, smudged, imperfect, tangential. One event or thought bleeding between past and future experiences. Our journey is next mediated by a machine eye. We have facts and visual clues but truth is still elusive. These facts are up for interpretation and reinterpretation. The suggest but cannot define. We end with a journey distilled into fact: distances traveled, cities visited, dates, times.

The journal pages I cannot understand, but I understand the idea of a journey that they embody. When I travel, I keep similar notebooks. The photographs present less a specific place for me than a rich suggestive vein of possibility. The facts and figures leave me cold and I can do little but flip through. It is the hand written notes and photographs that hold my attention. Neither provides me literal facts but each presents a journey taken and suggests journeys yet to be taken.

It all makes sitting in this windowless, fluorescent lit, cavernous room more bearable.

31 days 807.3km
Oh SeBeom
world-of-ddanjit.tistory.com/

Commercial Photography & the Birth of Consumer, Kim Han-Yong

On the shelves of the library at The Educational Alliance Art School, where I used to teach, were several photography annuals from the 1940s and 1950s of photographs ranging across all genres. I looked through these on many days before classes. It was amazing to me how some of the photographs looked incredibly dated, even older than they actually were, while others remained fresh, vital, vibrant.

Kim Han Yong’s Commercial Photography & the Birth of Consumer is similarly fascinating time capsule from the past. A big difference is that this is a contemporary retrospective reconsidering the historical context of Kim’s advertising photography from the 1950s through early 1980s.

Kim Han-Yong, Commercial Photography & the Birth of Consumer *

Kim Han-Yong’s photographs are inextricably linked with the ads to which they belong. With a few exceptions, Kim’s photographs, if taken out of the contextual space of their resident advertisements, would fall flat. (In all truth, some of the images fall flat even within the context of the ads and others are saved only be their social or pictorial weirdness.) Regardless of how each works as a photograph, Within the context of the ads, the photographs as a whole become a rich trove of historical suggestion and cultural foundation. This is one aspect of the origin of the South Korean consumer state.

Commercial Photography & the Birth of Consumer [sic] presents a cross section of Kim’s advertising work along with three essays (in both Korean and English) placing that work into a social historical context. Each section of the book has introductory text pulled from an interview with Kim (in Korean only). The book’s format is very much in keeping with the nature of the advertising posters and photographs being presented. The cover is bright and glossy–like a textbook from middle school. The book is large without being oversize. Posters are generally presented one on each right hand page with captioning info on the opposite page, though those in the section titled “Charm of the Non-Real” are run across the gutter which ruins them. Several posters have outtakes from the shoots presented as a contrast to the retouched ads. Captioned information for each poster includes client, designer, model, technical photographic information and other project information as available. This is not the finest Korean photo book I have seen, but its design is very finely considered–workroom has really hit the nail on the head here.

The book is broken into four chapters: Classic Beauty, Discovery of Consumer, Portrait of Consumer, Charm of the Non-real and Erotic. They are not based on chronology so much as they are on typology. We begin in Classic Beauty with the model as spokes-person. These simple ads associates a product with a beautiful and/or famous person, but we are not given a dream that to aspire to beyond that association. In Discovery of Consumer we have a narrative suggestion but remain in an abstract space. These ads implies that this product will make us happy or beautiful or desired or fulfilled or whatever; though the narrative remains simple and relational. In the Portrait of Consumer we are shown the black and white world of reality in which these ads operated. These are the earliest photographs in the book, primarily from the 1950s and early 1960s. The shift from the color advertising to the black and white documentary photography effectively presents the challenges and opportunities that existed for advertising in building a consumer society during this time (as well as shows that in some ways things are what they ever were). Charm of the Non-Real is contemporary advertising: here narrative is complex within certain cliched advertising tropes–sex, money, love, happiness, and we are presented with an entire environment and an entire lifestyle in which the product exists. There remains plenty of weirdness in the photographs, but these are modern advertisements that could be from any western society at that time if we changed the type face. Erotic is a handful of suggestive but chaste photographs of beautiful (and natural) women wrapped around phallic stacks of oil cans or wearing bikinis and holding gas pumps… these look more cute than erotic to present day sensibilities. My favorite from this chapter is of a woman in a bikini kneeling on a beach, leaning forward, mouth half open in either ecstasy or anticipation and she is facing… a young boy who is holding out a garland of flowers to put around her neck. What is the suggestion here and to whom is it directed? It is a weird and a somewhat discomfiting photograph. It’s a good weird, though. And in general, that is what most of the photographs are: a good weird.

The essays at the end are a mixed bag. It’s possible that poor translations contribute to this.

Lee Young June’s essay is the most astute of the three and the most specifically about Kim’s photography and the advertising posters of which they are a part. The central ideas running through her essay are that “the feature of [Kim’s] photography more important than indexicality is that it trains the viewer sensually” and that “…it is senseless to compare commercial photography to reality. Commercial photography is like futures trading in that it is a preview to the beauty and fantasy that do not exist yet.” I especially like that second description of advertising photography. This idea of the image as aspiration follows through into Her Boyoon’s essay. Seo Dong-Jin’s writing is more political and is about Kim’s photographs only in as much as they are a convenient jumping off point to speak about economic topics, though towards the end he describes Kim’s “Photography Research Lab” as a place where objects were not photographed but instead are imbued with added representational value to make them into “the real thing”. This section of his essay, which mostly leaves quotable name checking theory behind, is the most relevant to the subject at hand and the most clearly understandable. (I suspect that Seo’s essay suffers the most from translation and that reading it in Korean I would have a more favorable view of it.)

Overall, this is not the book that I would suggest as a point of entry to Korean photography. The work is more historical than personal and is presented as such. It feels like a lesson teaching us how the world became what it is and the importance of this figure. For those interested in the development of advertising, the building of a consumer society or the economics of consumption, though, this is a fascinating book. It doesn’t just look like a textbook, it is a textbook.

Title: Commercial Photography & the Birth of Consumer
Author: Kim Han-Yong
Contributors: Lee Young June (Profound Circumstances Commercial Photography Had to Cope With), Her Boyoon (Object of Dream, Dream of Object), Seo Dong-Jin (Memory of Commodities: Kim Han-Yong’s Photographs, the Images of Material Culture of Korean Captialsim)
Publisher: The Museum of Photography, Seoul (Ga-Hyeon Foundation of Culture)
Design: workroom
Copyright 2011

* Cover Image from The Book Society website. The Book Society is one of my favorite book shops in Seoul. I’ll post at some point about where to find photo books in Seoul another time.

Sacred Wood, Bae Bien-U

My first introduction to Korean photography was Bae Bien-U. Korean photography didn’t exist for me before Bae. I’m now not sure how Korean photography fell into a blind spot, though, as I write that, I wonder how many other photographic traditions do not exist in my mind? Until traveling to Turkey in 2011, I never really considered Turkish photography. Without a point of introduction, how is one to know that something exists?

I first encountered Bae’s work at the Asian Art fair held at the Javitz Center in New York a number of years ago. The photographs were, as I am now aware, his most recognizable: black and white, panoramic and very large photographs of groves of pine trees surrounding the royal tombs in Kyung-Ju. They were beautiful, but the scale and presentation turned me off. Bae’s pine trees ought to have made an electric connection. The pine tree is nearly as culturally freighted in Maine, where I grew up, as it is in Korea.

It is a pleasant surprise then that Sacred Wood connects with me in a way that the large prints in a white cube setting didn’t. The private interaction with the book is intimate, nearly spiritual. These photographs, taken over the past 25 years, are luminous and lyrical. They are a kind of twisting visual poetry. Having been to several of the groves depicted in these pine trees, I can attest that these are not simple snapshots. Bae has imposed himself upon the scene. These are not unguarded or unsung places. The kings of Silla have many visitors. I can’t imagine that any aside from Bae has made photographs as moving. (I am sad to say that the photographs I took there do not measure up.)

The light, especially in the earlier photographs, is diffuse and soft. It spreads between the trees like fog. The trees seem to be melting into the morning mist. One is tempted to place them in the Western context of the landscape photographs of Adams or Weston. I think this impulse is wrong: though there might be superficial aesthetic similarities, the path is different. Bae makes his approach through the spiritual. (Hatje Cantz in the blurb for the book calls the photographs meditative.) Whatever technical prowess Bae has, and he has plenty, it is not what drives the photographs. Whereas the F64 group turned to straight photographs as a reactive break from pictorialism, Bae’s photographs represent a continuation of cultural tradition. The pine tree is a revered symbol in Korea; the very format of the photographs–the narrow panoramic aspect ratio, harkens back to brush and ink scroll paintings. Unlike a younger photographer such as Seung Woo Back with his visual and political rabble rousing, Bae is extending existing cultural traditions through photography.

The physical book is quite nice. It is a roughly 11×14 horizontal slab with a printed cover and 2 piece cardboard slipcase. The book opens with two essays, the first by Wonkyung Byun and the second by Thomas Wagner. These are followed by 71 illustrations, 12 of them in color. The printing is very good, as is to be expected from Hatje Cantz. Most of the spreads have two opposing panoramic images, though there are roughly a dozen spreads with either full bleed double truck panoramas or multiple vertical panoramas on a page. Each image is captioned with an archive number and a year. Had I been the editor, I would have cut the color images: only a couple of them have the power and beauty of the black and white photographs. They feel out of place. Likewise, I do not feel that the captions add to the book; they, too, feel out of place. (There must be a reason for this captioning though, as Bae uses it in another book of his that I have.) These two design miscues make the book feel like an exhibition catalog, which is what it is: published in conjunction with exhibits by Phillips de Pury & Company, London and BOZAR Center for Fine Arts, Brussels. I would have preferred that if it were to be a catalog, it not have been treated as a sales catalog.

Utopia / Blow Up, Seung Woo Back

Cover of Utopia / Blow Up by Seung Woo Back

Seung Woo Back’s Utopia / Blow Up comprises his two related series of the same names. I purchased this book on a trip in 2009 and it remains one of my favorites. It is interesting not only for the images themselves, but also the conceptual framework girding them and the physical container they exist in. Each reinforces the others.

The physical book is 36 pages, oversized and printed full color with metallic embossed details on newsprint in an edition of 1000. There is a 3 page insert with essays in both English and Korean by Hye Young Shin and Pyong-Jong Park. Jeong Eun Kim edited the book, and Yeoun Joo Park designed it. U/BU was published in 2009 in collaboration with IANNBOOKS.

Utopia is Back’s fictionalized North Korea; by exaggerating, adding to and dividing the infrastructure in existing images he plays with the notion of an idealized society’s physical structure. His is not a glossy antiseptic ideal. The color palate is muted (exacerbated by the newsprint), the forms verge on the grotesque and unlikely, lighting can be garish and the skies become acidic. If this is what North Korea’s infrastructure might look like if it fulfilled the rhetoric and claims of its propaganda, it would still be a sad place. The streets remain empty. The scale remains crushingly anti-human.

If one reads the book from the opposite direction, Blow Up presents telling details extracted from otherwise anodyne negatives Back created on a month long stay in 2001 as a journalist in North Korea. Accepting the regime’s destruction of his “interesting” or “good” negatives, Back turns to the smallest of details in his remaining negatives to subtly lay bare the lie presented to outsiders. With an obvious nod to Antonioni, Back is looking to find truths that are hidden in plain sight and to question what is presented in an image. The photographs might be a kind of spying, a notion suggested by the military imagery which bind the two projects at the newspaper’s center point.

Alternately, in these images of war material and heavy bombing we can see a dividing line. If one has started reading from left to right, e.g. with Utopia, at this point we move from what might have been to what is

In both projects, Back is exploring the line between reality and fiction in the photographic image. By creating unreal images out of real images, he makes the real more apparent.

Black Midday, Taewon Jang

Taewon Jang’s Black Midday presents an unassuming face. Aside from a single thumb cut index and the heft of a brick, its exterior presents none of the turmoil within. I almost passed this book by, which would have been a mistake. Once the cover is opened, the book begins to present a rich and out of the ordinary experience full of terror and loss. In it’s colophon, there is this description: “the book examines the psychological situations drawn from reality and fiction, memory and oblivion, absence and presence.”

The book’s 340 pages are broken up into four sections: Text, Generic Landscapes, Plates and Victims.

Text contains correspondences between Jang and various Japanese friends (many of whom are photographers or others in the arts) after the Tohoku earthquake as well as an essay by Suejin Shing, who I have posted on previously.

Generic Landscapes comprises images taken in Japan after the earthquake. The images are dark and intense; they are printed full bleed or with black borders; this section is the only one with a gloss coating. The photographs were taken under moonlight and have an eerie beauty. In opposition to the beauty of the images is the fact of the desolate ruination.

Plates is broken up into two subsections: the first, on uncoated white pages, is a series of prints rephotographed repeatedly in such a way that the viewer’s sense of the image wavers in and out. The image disappears into the vanishing point of perspective. Mixed in with these are photographs of paper artifacts such as business cards, hand written notes or sales brochures that give the address of the plates in the second subsection–a sort of travelogue. The final image of this subsection is the image that has been buried beneath the process of rephotographing: a small building covered in and being subsumed into debris. The second subsection within Plates is printed on black uncoated paper. The images are of interior and exterior spaces that Jang visited while making this work: offices, shops, homes; courtrooms or government hearings; landscapes, people in the street. The damage of the earthquake breaks into this through a photograph of a large ship on dry land and a desolate lot with a framed image from the previous section.

Victims, the final section, is a series of installation shots of mixed media portraits. These portraits–presented first as a thumbnail image for reference, are photographs mounted to wooden forms which have been folded and otherwise manipulated. The portraits are fragmented; the subjects likeness is deformed.

Of all the photography books I’ve acquired in Korea, this is among the most ambitious. We begin with the fear of loss. Jang is reaching out to confirm that those close to him are not lost to him. Conversation confirms existence. The book continues on into terror. The landscape photographs of the sites of the disaster are terrifying in their affirmation of the power and irrational destructiveness of nature. Even at a remove of days, weeks or months, the fear of potentiality or eventuality remains. We cannot remain in a state of terror or shock, however. Plates transforms terror as it dissolves into ongoing everyday life. The rephotographed image is a stand in for the oscillation of fear over time as we are removed from its immediacy. Everyday life eases our mind. We are left with the image to remind us. Victims brings back the terror, but does so in a way that reminds us that this terror is not nature’s alone. These portraits are of Japanese people in New York; they are not victims of the earthquake. They are victims of the artist: it is the artist who has deformed their likeness and associated them with the earthquake.

The earthquake is not the subject of this book. It is our response as human beings that Jang is interested in. How do we see? How do we remember? Do we respond to, create or invent reality?

Dashwood Books in NYC has this book, as does Photo Eye in Santa Fe. It is also easily available at Book Society or Your Mind Bookshop in Seoul.

**This post was first published in a “Book Notes” post on the daily_up.
***I stole the book cover image from Photo-Eye because I haven’t had a moment to shoot a picture of the book. Sorry Photo-Eye.

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