Franticham at Printed Matter Art Book Fair @ PS1

I spent a rushed hour swinging through Printed Matter‘s NY Art Book Fair at PS1 this afternoon. The museum was a veritable zoo; to say it was thronged would be an understatement. With all the bumping and brushing of the crowds, I found it difficult to take in the books or to really focus on them. Next year I’ll be sure to go on the Friday when the crowds are thinner and the focus is on seeing rather than being seen. It was a bit of a scene today.

While there were dozens of publishers showing hundreds (thousands?) of books, the highlight of the fair for me was a quick conversation with Anticham and Francis van Meale of the Red Fox Press. I find their books delightful and I bought two to add to the half dozen I already own. Tomorrow’s review will be about one of these books. A future review will look at a broader selection of books by them. Hopefully we can figure out an interview somehow sometime soon.

If you’re in New York you should cancel all of your plans for Sunday and head over to PS1 to check out the fair. It’s hot, noisy and crowded, but it’s worth braving these hassles to see the full breadth of Franticham’s oeuvre. Their new book of screen printed LA-scapes is fantastic (though a bit out of my reach). And there’s plenty of other stuff to see at the fair, something for every taste.

Bad photographer that I am, I didn’t take any pictures. Not even with my cellphone.

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

nowhere, now here; Mi-Jeong Baek

Recently on this blog I wrote about Chanmin Park’s unbound book Blocks. I am quite enamored of that book, both for its quietly discomfiting photographs and playful interactive design. Mi-Jeong Baek’s nowhere, now here, also from IANNBOOKS, makes use of a similar unbound design.

A yellow belly band holds the folded leaves of nowhere, now here together. Removing this band and opening the cover, one finds an 8 page insert on thin tissue-like paper. This insert has two plates of overlapping ghosted images and a poem (in both Korean and English) that acts as a kind of coda for the photographs:

I am in a faint state of being,
neither asleep nor awake.
…
My eyes open at a force that
seems like an explosion.
…

We come to the photographs. The photographs are suffused with faintness: light overwhelms; fog and snow diffuse; focus drops away; color is muted and soft; location is indistinct; orienting references are absent. It is as though we have drifted into a waking reverie, gliding through the world, lost in a mindful whimsy. And within that faintness a point of clarity becomes apparent and takes hold. It might be a singular detail in an image or the pull of recognition across a sequence; this point pushes us into a state of awareness. Continue reading →

Bonus: A package from Anticham

We’re on a break here at Korean Photography Books, but I have a quick bonus post for you.

The NY Art Book Fair is coming up. I took a quick look through the list of exhibitors on the off chance there might be a publisher I could reach out to regarding an interview, and lo and behold there is one from Korea. A small publisher. A self-publisher, really.

Antic-Ham is a Seoul based artist who makes wonderful artists books by hand. Her books meander through photography, illustration, collage, assemblage and poetry. I purchased a handful of photo centric books through her site. They arrived neatly wrapped–like gifts. I’ll definitely be writing about these books either individually or as a group this fall. In the meantime, everyone loves a good unboxing so below is the unwrapping of the books.

I’m looking forward to visiting the NY Art Book Fair at PS1 in September and hopefully connecting with Antic-Ham–the person and the myth. Antic-Ham, if you’re reading this, I would love to conduct an interview if you can fit one into what I assume will be a very packed schedule.

We’ll be off for two weeks

Prospect Park, Brooklyn; Summer stage; photo by Michael N. Meyer, onthego.photos

Hope summer is treating everyone well. Korean Photography Books will be quiet through the end of August as I enjoy the last few weeks of summer here in Brooklyn. Regular posting each Sunday will resume September 7th.

There is a stack of books ready for review–enough to keep me busy through the end of the year. Additionally, I plan to update most of the posts published to date with photographs of the books. And, as ever, I’m planning to arrange a couple of interviews, hopefully during NY Art Book Fair and a (possible) holiday trip to Korea. I’m also be working on a grant proposal for the Asian Cultural Council to produce a concerted series of interviews for this blog; last year’s proposal didn’t bear fruit, but hopefully this year’s will. All in all, there is much to come here on Korean Photo Books.

I look forward to seeing you back here at Korean Photography Books in September. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss new content once we’re cranking again in September.

A Conversation With Jaeyu Lee

Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jaeyu Lee to speak with him about photography, book making and cultural materialism as it relates to both photography and to his design day job. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

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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.

Late Post; New Interview and New Content Page Coming

My social life beckoned this past weekend, and this week’s post was postponed. The review that was intended for this past Sunday will be up later this week.

Also, last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Jaeyu Lee for a conversation following up on my review of his Fragments in Scene. It was a wide ranging interview; he is fascinating and a lively conversationalist. I am in the midst of transcribing the interview (in between the commercial jobs that pay my rent…); it should be up in the next week or two.

As a follow up to a reader question, I will be updating a post from my daily_up blog and publishing it here as a top level page. This will be a listing of bookstores in Korea. At the moment it will be Seoul-centric as I’ve not found any bookstores outside of Seoul, though I know second hand of several in Busan and elsewhere.

So, there is new stuff coming soon. Once it’s all up this post will come down.

Fragments in Scene, Jaeyulee

An Acela Express train is whisking me back to New York City, but I’m already there.

Jaeyulee’s Fragments in Scene is open on my lap. It is suffocating and cacophonous. Photograph after photograph bombards the reader. A compressed tonal scale and a rough half-tone accentuate the visual density of the individual photographs, which run helter-skelter across the gutter. The pace is relentless. There is nowhere for the eye to rest. New York City screams from each page.
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