Category Archives: Conceptual

On The Line, ed. Shin Suejin

Here in American it is Memorial Day Weekend. It is the official start of the summer driving season. BBQ grills are on overdrive, and nearly everyone is gathered around one. In Brooklyn the cyclists are out in droves, and the mood is festive. The skies are blue. And, oh by the way, the weekend is meant to provide an opportunity to memorialize those who have given everything to preserve this country in the many (military) struggles it has been engaged in and to reflect upon their sacrifice.

To extend this memorializing and reflection to another country and another culture is dangerous. To even broach the raw emotions of contemporary politics is more dangerous still (and rude). Well, so be it.
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xyZ City, workroom

As I’ve noted in the past, I’m a bit of an urban planning geek. It comes from my grandfather who was involved with local government. I find the urban space endlessly fascinating. A proper city is always in a state of flux. Blink and the city changes. This interest is reflected on my bookshelves and my personal photographic archive. I dig cities.

It’s no wonder then that I was drawn to workroom’s xyZ City, though I’m not entirely clear what the book is. An illustrated treatise? An exhibition catalog? An exhibition in book form? There is no English text, so I’m left with the title, layout and photographs themselves to decipher it.
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Pla-Wars, GyooSik Kim

My childhood was filled with mock battles, computer games and half finished model making. I clearly remember several of the unfinished models: a WWII era US aircraft carrier, an FA-18 fighter jet, Kennedy’s PT-104 (a story that fascinated me) and an F-14 Tomcat. As a entered my teens, the first President Bush went to war with Iraq; it was an easy (and brief) transition from half-heartedly collecting baseball cards to half-heartedly collecting cards depicting the materiel of war. With all of that conditioning, it is a wonder that I never joined the military.

One might justify all of this as a benign means of engaging with history or learning engineering or strategy skills. Or, one might cynically suggest that our society, indeed most societies, are militaristic at their core and mold their youngest citizens accordingly. The Secret Machines, their album “Now Here is Nowhere” playing in the background while I was looking at the book, sang: “The road leads where it’s led.” When we make childhood into a simulacra of war, what life journey are we suggesting for individuals and what future for society at large?
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untitled (Annual Image Book), Go Dae Gun, Yoo Byung Seo & Lee Yun Ho

KoreanPhotographyBooks-100

After interviewing the crew at Corners, Jimin and I took a cab over to The Book Society. During the brief taxi ride I tried to describe what made a book interesting to me. The essentials of my explanation was that I liked highly idiosyncratic personal photographic visions published in object like book form. At The Book Society, she pulled a small volume off of the small publishers and self-published shelf and, holding it out, said, “I think you’ll like this one.”
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Blocks, Chanmin Park

Blocks

Every time that I have gone to Korea I have been absolutely astounded by the pace and the sheer volume of hi-rise apartment construction. While most of this astonishment has been a general sense of enormity suggested by the breadth of this construction, over my last several visits I have been able to watch one particular development being built across from my mother in law’s apartment complex. What was once a small tangle of streets forming a neighborhood is now a construction site from which half a dozen towers are rising. (Alan, the post office from which we sent the DIY first issue letter is now gone and its postmark now rare, if not valuable.) This development sits directly between two existing developments and within spitting distance of at least three other new developments.
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A Forest Three Meters Squared, Yuri An

As the youngest descendant of all dying things
I
am here.

This is the last line from Yuri An’s poem “I Will, I Was / For My Death” and an apt summation of A Forest Three Meters Squared. The poems and photographs in the book are heavy with worry. An anxiety is pervasive–and yet there is also hopeful desire and affirmative longing.

The photographs worry at the edges of the quotidian and find dark images beneath the surface. A dark dock stretches out into a lake, the light in the sky reaching down in a delta shape echoing and refuting the darkness of the dock. A dark frame with an circular image fragment at its center, below it a sunset with the circular fragment missing from its center. A tangle of dense greenery bursting forward. The mottled reflection of light on water, a dark band of shadow cutting across it. The red moon hangs in a dark sky partly obscured by tree branches. A plane screams across the sky leaving a dark contrail to trace its path inevitably bound to dissipate and disappear. All the images underscored with the tessellated jaggedness of a video grab–suggestion of a continuity interrupted.

The photographs sit at the book’s center. From one direction the poetry can be read in Korean. Flip the book over and from the opposite direction the poetry can be read in English. Either way, one ends at the photographs in the center. At the center is the visual image.

An asks in the book’s preface, “when all people shared the same language did they understand each other? Did they share the same dream?” Living in a strange place, away from home and distanced by language, An’s fears spring from opportunity and possibility as much as from strangeness. Complete homogeneity no more guarantees intimacy than does the foreign guarantee alienation. A shared language is not understanding. An image shared is not an idea conveyed. A memory shared is not forever; how does the tree share your secret?

From “Irreconcilable Time,” the first poem in the book:

For some time, I
have locked up time
instilled your memories in my room
Sealed traces, airtight
Living moments, captured, freshly picked
What you and I exchanged
breath
air

I can’t say that I understand the poems (that is as likely my own failing as any issue with the translation) or that I have understood the book’s particulars. I do understand the longing and the fear. I have my own room in which I seal traces. The moments once living, once freshly picked, now captured. But, they’ll be gone soon enough.

A Forest Three Meters Squared
Written, photographed and designed by An (email)
2012
Proofread by:
Kyoung mee choi (sic)
Eunsoo Lee
Jinah Lee
Andrew McCullough
Noga Harel
Production: Gerrit Rietveld Academie

In Between, Taeyoung Kang

As usual, I returned from Seoul with a suitcase full of books. Because of my limited time for browsing for books during my brief trips, I generally err on the side of caution and buy a book if I see some detail that I think bodes well: a design flourish, a single image that catches my eye, a weight or density. This generally works well for me. Sometimes it doesn’t.

Taeyoung Kang’s In Between is full of promise. The simple and distinctive Aprilsnow Press’ cover design with a photo tipped into the bright red linen is an opening salvo. It calls out from the book shelf. On a cursory glance through, there are numerous wonderfully composed and engaging photographs.

A WB Yeats quote from “Sailing to Byzantium” sets the book’s tone: “Whatever is begotten, born and dies.” The first several pictures take this cue and run with it. The first picture is two empty shell sitting beside several small plants in loose soil; the caption tells us this is in a cemetery. It is followed by a pair of landscapes of the tombs in Gyung-ju; in the first, two boys wearing white back to back stepping away from one another as though dueling; in the second, picture there is only one boy, crouching. The next picture is a boy playing in a ruin; he appears to levitate off the ground, his head poking into a window in the ruin. From this strange and slightly unsettling opening, the book begins to wander.

The wandering is literal and figurative. We are brought to France, back to Korea, then on to Mauritius, Switzerland, Hong Kong, the US, Turkey, Jordan, Italy, Germany, Syria and England. All are revisited throughout the book. It is a whirlwind world tour of the everyday: street scenes, still life vignettes, grand landscapes and portraits.

Though we may travel the world, we are not among a family of man. This is not some grand statement of unity. Instead we are in a space of “between-ness”. In our shifting location we are never “here”; we are always moving between. The photographs hover between light and dark: a young girl on the edge of a pool of light steps out into the dark surround; a boy hides behind a lamp post’s silhouette before a luminous background of dirt; a man directly under a light in a restaurant covers his face; a young woman at a bar sits in a pool of light looking out at the crowd surrounding her recede into darkness. We are often divided from the subjects we view: they are half hidden by other objects in the scene; they are partly erased by reflections in glass; or they are covered by shadow. Or the we catch a moment between moments: a pair of people in mid-step, their weight neither still on the top step or yet on the bottom step; a man leaning over to lift a brazier of coals, his hand pulling on its handle but not yet taking its weight.

This is a book that I wanted to like it and expected to. There are many lovely images and as an object the book is nicely designed, printed and put together. It looks great on my book shelf. Any number of the photographs would look wonderful framed on the wall. However, the wandering is too great. We cover too much territory. A third of the images could have been left on the editing table. Flipping through the book too many images pull me from the rhythm and disrupt the flow. I can’t find reason for transitions between images; I’m not sure what I am meant to come to understand through reading this book.

In Between
Taeyoung Kang
with text by Kay Jun
Edited and Designed by Kay Jun, Jeong Jae-wan
Proofread by Kang Young-gyu
Translated by Angelina Gieun Lee
Printed by Munsung Printing
Published by Aprilsnow Press
First edition January 2013

Five Views From Korea @ Noorderlicht Photo Gallery

The Noorderlicht Photogallery will be showing Five Views from Korea February 8th through April 13th. Work from Seung Woo Back, Jaegu Kang, Insook Kim, Suntag Noh and Xuezhe Shen is brought together to examine “the discomfort and nagging feeling of an unending cold war since the division of the Korean peninsula.”

From Guest Curator Sujong Song:

Every day, the papers are flooded with news heralding tension on the Korean Peninsula. Perhaps because they are in the eye of the storm, but the people living in the southern half are largely skeptical of an outbreak of war. The feeling closest to fear they experience is annoyance, as if they’ve been reminded of a particularly stubborn splinter that might never be removed. Guest curator Sujong Song presents with Five Views from Korea five projects from photographers, which are the result of these frustrations felt in everyday life by this reality.
‘Ultimately, these are narratives regarding five perspectives on either the nations tied to the divided Korean Peninsula or the identity of those who live within the countries’ influences. Invisible ideologies attempt to control us in whatever way possible, while we struggle to overcome that restraint. It is the things unseen that dig most deeply into our everyday lives, irrevocably bore into our skin.’

On this blog we’ve looked at some of the photographers included in the exhibit, and reviews of books that include work of at least one of the others are in the works. This looks like an interesting show. Too bad I won’t be able to get to Groningen to check it out. Hopefully there will be a catalog or accompanying book available.

More info.

On the Clouds, Boomoon

Boomoon was the first Korean photographer I encountered.

Before I left for NYU fifteen years ago, my parents bought me a subscription to Lightwork, which included a print and a book. (The book was Todd Hido’s Outskirts.) This subscription also landed me on Nazraeli‘s catalog, which is where I encountered Boomoon’s Naksan and later his One Picture Book #26, On the Clouds. Nazraeli describes Boomoon as “one of Korea’s greatest contemporary photographers.” Though I purchased neither, both Naksan and OPB #26: On the Clouds are touchstones of my earliest interest in photo books.

When I went to Korea for the first time, one of the first books of Korean photography that I came across and purchased was Boomoon’s On the Clouds, the same photographs as OPB #26: On the Clouds and the same title but a different book. It must have been fate.

This is neither here nor there in regards to the book itself.

On the Clouds comprises photographs of the sliver of sky above the cloud horizon and below space as seen from commercial airliners. The photographs are a slope of blue above cloud white. The last several plates in the book are taken in evening light in which the clouds form a dark gradient with the sky above drifting into the dark of space.

The book’s physical form is a simple folded signature with exposed stitching and board covers. The cover is a slightly ghosted photograph with the title and photographer’s name in white lettering. On the rear cover is the same ghosted image with the publisher’s name in white lettering. The book opens with a title page followed by the first plate and then a short text by Taro Amano in English and Korean. The plates begin in earnest after this text with a gate fold spread of three images. Most spreads are pairs of images, though a double gate fold is tucked into the layout. There are 23 plates in total. The plates are followed by the artist’s CV (in English and Korean), an index of the plates and the book’s colophon page.

This is a simple book of simple photographs that offer complex possibility for reflection. What on first examination appears to be a straightforward formula becomes photographs full of nuance, spatial and chromatic. The viewers eyes hover between the compositional emptiness of the foreground clouds and the dark physical emptiness of space pressing in above the clouds. I find this meeting of voids, compositional and subject, to be powerfully evocative. Boomoon has pared these images back to an absolute minimum of information and yet they suggest much meaning.

On the Clouds
Boomoon
Published by Nabizang / Choi Woong Lim
Essay “The Ever Changing Sky” by Taro Amano
Translation by Yun Ki Eun (Korean) and Sumiko Yamakawa (English)
Designed by Design Seed, Kim Mee Jin and Lee Jae Hyun
Printed by GG Communications
2006, edition of 1000

Two Faces, Lee Duegyoung

Sometimes, the answers are all right in front of you. And at other times, small things obscure them.

An aside before the actual review: Lee Duegyoung’s Two Faces includes a list of notes by critic Lim Geun-jun that give detailed descriptions of his previous projects and working methods. Lim’s very clear description of Lee’s “Teheranno” as panoramic composites made from photographs taken from a helicopter with a downward facing camera to mimic satellite imagery clarifies for me the images I mentioned last week as a stand out in the 2012 Seoul Photo Festival. I had not connected them in my mind to Two Faces because Lee’s name was transliterated differently in the SPF catalog. For my part, I have always transliterated names as they are transliterated in the publication and will continue to do so despite the obvious possibility for missed connections. On to the review.

Lee Duegyoung maintains an incredible consistency of good ideas coupled with masterful execution and high-quality book design. Given his past exhibits and publications, it is little wonder that Two Faces is such a strong book. I may be faulted for wearing my heart on my sleeve here, but so be it. I like this book. Two Faces is one of the most engaging Korean photo books I have acquired recently. Both the content and design are outstanding; as a bonus the texts are clearly written and available in both Korean and English.

Two Faces comprises two panoramic photographs of the north and south banks of the Han River as it runs through Seoul. Lee composited roughly 13,000 photographs taken over four days from multiple river boats into two panoramic images. The two panoramas run essentially unbroken opposite from one another, top and bottom, across the accordion pages of the book. The book places the reader almost in the prow of a boat from which he can look left and right at the two banks of the Han. The “accordion” is perfect bound along one edge preventing the reader from opening it up to peruse long stretches of the panoramas.

Due to the inevitable perspective shifts caused by shooting from a moving platform, some tall buildings away from the river’s banks appear multiple times in slightly shifted positions. This gives an experiential edge to the photographs. Just as an actual viewer on a river cruise might espy the same edifice from multiple angles over the course of the journey, so too is the reader treated to this experience. Any sense of an absolute recording of the river is broken, the panoramas present a view that is spatial and temporal and hint at a continuum of possible views.

Lim notes that one of Lee’s influences is Ed Ruscha’s trilogy of artists books: Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations and Thirty-Four Parking Lots. This makes perfect sense to me, though the incredible breadth of Lee’s effort brings to my mind another project: Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh. in Two Faces Lee has taken an equally ambitious target but rather than get bogged down in endless possibility has brought the work to a magnificent completion through a tightly focused conceptual framework and equally tight physical form. I’m sure there’s a jazz metaphor here, but I’m not a jazz guy.

The physical form effectively contributes to the conclusion of Lee’s Hangang trilogy by referencing the previous projects. The cover presents us with a complete foreshadowing of the work within: the panoramas have been compressed into the length of the wraparound cover. This calls to mind the time compressed video that accompanied the exhibition of Lee’s Hangang Project II – 25 Bridges. Lim notes the video, and I take take his note a step further to explicitly make the connection with Two Faces‘s cover. So too would I point out the somewhat obvious connection of the book’s accordion form to his 69 Snack Booths catalog which also employed an accordion form. These small formal and technical echoes that tie project to project create a sense of structured completeness.

I’ll end with a small personal detail that I enjoy: in the panorama that tracks the north bank of the Han, Lee has photographed my mother-in-law’s apartment building under construction shortly before she would have moved in.

Singular concept.
Tight design.
A work fully thought through.

Two Faces
Lee Duegyoung
Written by: Lim Guen-jun and Rhee Z-Won
Translated by: Choi S. Min and Kim Sung
Edited and Designed by: Suki and Min
Specter Press, Seoul
Edition of 700
2010