Category Archives: Landscape

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/

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.