The Seoul Essays II, version 2: Pleasures of the Everyday

Word Count: 23,838
App. MS Word pages (single-spaced): 49 pages
Note: Red denotes changes or areas to recheck

DESIRE

Much of my photography, especially in the earlier part of my stay here in Korea, can be understood from the perspective of desire. As a man, a foreigner, and as a new person in a big city, much of my desire was a function of envy. However, this was a not a crude and common envy expressed in terms of me wanting a particular object, such as a designer brand items that I cannot afford; mine was a desire for normalcy, for a sense of belonging – the unattainable goal of being on the inside of something.

As a newcomer to Seoul, as a Fulbright grant recipient with free housing and a monthly stipend, as a person without any rigid, daily connections to any Koreans – whether in a school, office, or other social group – I was quite alone. Of course, there were literally millions of people teeming about me wherever I went, but I was not in any way connected to them. I spoke their language, I was familiar with daily life here, and nothing was shockingly unusual to me, if only because of my previous experience living a somewhat difficult life in Korea already. But something was missing, as I felt cut-off from the people all around me. I didn't consciously realize it at the time, but the desire to not be disconnected marks a lot of my photography at the time.

I felt desire for meeting old friends and laughing all night long; I wanted to be a regular at a bar or a cafe where people knew my name and my regular order; I wanted to be one of the myriad couples I see who go out to dinner, hold hands in the movie theater, and even furtively slip away together into private places that Koreans don't like to talk about. My desire can be simply described as a desire to be normal, non-descript, a face in the crowd. It was an impossible dream, as I come from a different culture, race, and nationality than the Koreans around me, but it was a real desire nonetheless.

"Social Studying"

I took more portraits at the time, as one of my ideas was one of making a picture series of "Everyday Koreans" of all backgrounds, occupations, and styles. The idea was to capture the diversity of people whom I see here, opposing the dominant idea that Korean people are "homogenous" or "monocultural." Of course, there is a background of common culture and even conformity here, but I wanted to concentrate on the diversity I saw here.

"Bar Owners"

Thinking about it after the fact, I believe that there was also a great desire on my part to connect with people, because in order to make a portrait, as opposed to a candid shot, one has to talk to people, make them comfortable, form a relationship with them.

"Fishcake Stand"

But I started abandoning this project slowly, as I became more concerned with pure street photography and as I realized just how logistically difficult it was to plan and arrange. I was also realizing that the portrait was not an exciting place for me to try and express the "reality" of the Korea that I had seen in my previous stay here, and wanted to somehow capture and convey to others. I wanted Koreans to see the unique Korea that I saw, which many foreigners often describe as "eclectic" or "surreal." I wanted non-Koreans to be able to feel the deep idiosyncrasies of this place, above and outside of superficial tourist brochures and guided bus tours. It just didn't seem to be possible to convey such things through mere portraits.

"Ajussis on May Day"

Portraits did capture something, but it wasn't enough. And on the person side of things, I was beginning to find my own social networks and ways of being less of a stranger here; I was finding a place for myself, and even as I was doing so, my street photography skills were getting sharper. Now, I had traveled from the level of superficial Seoul towards capturing things in a little more depth. After several months in Korea, I finally felt like I was decending deeper into a place that many foreign – and Korean – photographers seldom end up going. My journey had really started to get underway as I started to abandon the artificial way I had been trying to use my camera to create an artifical sense of intimacy; now, I was becoming more comfortable in my personal life here and was ready to use the camera to do the difficult job of capturing the moments when the "everyday" and the "peculiar." This was where the "real" Korea lay for me.

So I had developed a taste for the pure challenge of taking a true street photograph; I also had developed a craving for the buildup of tension that comes with waiting for and stalking desirable photographic "prey," taking the shot, and feeling the rare but overwhelming rush of satisfaction that comes with having successfully captured a decisive and fleeting image that can tell an entire story without words. I had developed a taste for – and become addicted to – the thrill of the "hunt."

THE HUNT

One can easily liken street photography to hunting, with heads on the walls and stuffed animals as the morbid trophies that are the pictures we street shooters take. This is what street photography is about, the raw pleasure it provides – because the moments I want to capture can never be duplicated or faked, and once they have passed, they are gone. There is only one chance to capture them, one chance to preserve the moment forever. This is what drives me to push the shutter button.

A devoted and determined street photographer will be able to capture some startling images. In order to capture these moments, though, what I quickly learned is that you have to know people, the environment, and how the two interact. It also helps to know the language and understand the "culture" – which is another way of saying that you should know the patterns of thought, motion, and movement. To me, knowing how to name the parts of the hanbok means nothing – that's doesn't reflect a knowledge of the people around you. Real knowledge of the people and surroundings allows you to predict pictures and stick around past a woman's fighting off her man's attempts to get her into a love motel, who thereafter storms off in a huff, hails a taxi, proceeds to sit in said taxi for two or three minutes, then return to the her waiting man with her arms crossed, whereupon they both enter the hotel, presumably to wait until the "morning calm" comes – or at least for a few hours, whichever comes first.

"Vanity"

It allows you to see, from a woman's arm going into her purse, from her increasingly halting gait, as well as from the kind of clothes she wears, that she is going to pull out her makeup kit to fix herself right in the middle of the street. The list of examples is endless, as is the number of times I've been wrong, and have internally proven my assumptions and stereotypes about the people I see completely wrong. My timing has also been off, and I have usually miss more moments than I have successfully captured. Most of my pictures are complete failures, and a look at any of my rolls shows slight variations on the same subject, most of which go right into my mental "reject" pile.

But perseverance defines the nature of the true street photographer. Out of a roll of 36 frames of film, a single image in which the elements come together into to define a "decisive moment" sends a chill down the spine of a true blue street shooter – who often sits hunched over long strips of film, squinting through a loupe when he realizes that he got that perfect shot he had hoped for – such are the moments worth living for. If you don't get that feeling, you just aren't made to shoot in the street. If you don't live for those shots, it's not in your blood.

"Street Itinerant"

The photographer who defines "street" for me is undoubtedly Garry Winogrand. In my eyes, he is the kingpin-mack-daddy-grandmaster-pimp of street photography; what's more, his photographic eye is the same as mine. Or, maybe I should more respectfully say – my eye resembles his. But thankfully, I did not even know of his existence until well after I became a street photographer myself, and developed my own particular style. I consider myself lucky to have been blissfully ignorant to the legacy of the great street photographers whose strong styles would certainly have influenced mine had I known about them as perhaps a visual arts or photography major. In a way, I started discovering street photographer quite late, which allowed me to develop without thinking, "Am I copying a Winogrand shot?" or "How can I take this in a non-Winogrand way?" I am so happy that I didn't have to worry about such things.

So when I came across Winogrand in an amazing book entitled – appropriately enough – Bystander : A History of Street Photography, and came across just a few of Winogrand's shots, I got that tingle. I felt like the pictures were mine. But the weird and amazing thing was that they weren't – they were his. Still, I felt like I had taken them. That's when I knew I had found my mentor, albeit posthumously and well after the fact of my nascent development as a street photographer. But I wouldn't have it any other way, as I was lucky to be able to appreciate and connect with Winogrand across the long stretches of time as well as my previous complete ignorance of his existence.

No longer did I have to feel guilty about my photographic impulses; I now believed what I had always suspected: that I shouldn't second-guess the purity of the impulse to shoot. That instinct is so strong and direct, not much else in life approaches that level of pure will and a feeling of possessing absolute purpose. To allow the standard socialized fear of breaking propriety, appearing "strange" in the eyes of others, receiving dirty looks, or even the fear of being physically challenged to mitigate and destroy this feeling was something I knew I should not do. Winogrand had, without his having ever known or imagined it, influenced me as much as any significant mentor in my life.

Many people reacted to Winogrand in his time in the same way many react to me – they either see what he's trying to do with his camera, and they label him a hack, pervert, technically incompetent, or all of the above. Who knows? His – and my – motivations might indeed be basely sexual. But I still think that both he and I used this energy constructively to yield some great and startling pictures. I strongly believe that the pictures I take are more than just the sum of peculiar, sexual pathologies.

Or maybe I'm AM just a pervert. I think the subway shot below says something, although what is being said is open to interpretation. To my great surprise, some people still smirk and ask me whether I was just trying to see up the skirt of the woman in the center of the frame. In my mind, taking Japanese-style "upskirt" shots was the last thing on my mind, as I found the woman's almost meditative calm – as she sits perfectly centered towards the camera in the midst of a group of people all individually engaged in doing something else – irresistible to shoot. Still, some people have laughed as they deride this picture as perversion. To those people, I always want to ask why this is the first conclusion that comes to mind. Of course, there may be some overlap between me and the "perverts" who upload pictures of women's panties to the Internet, but I know that most of my decisions to present a photograph are well above the belt. And that's enough for me.

"Subway Madonna"

As for the picture of the running couple below, it represents the kind of "decisive moment" that Cartier-Bresson talked about, but was taken in the particularly Winograndish mode in which I always shoot. But still, even seen within this style, my own characteristics are readily apparent. One major difference between me and Winogrand, for example, is the fact that I often shoot without looking through the viewfinder. I am sure this would make Winogrand roll over in his grave, as would Cartier-Bresson, for they both stressed exact control over composition. I've read that Winogrand's style was one of always looking through the lens, even if meant bringing up the camera to his eye in a quick motion to shoot, then bringing the camera down again.

"Ice Cream Thief"

But my kind of shooting brings about particular problems. Cartier-Bresson is reported to have shot with a "normal lens" of around 50mm, which for me is a zoom lens. In order to get two people in a frame, you have to stand back quite a bit. Since I like to get right up next to and amongst my subjects, a 50mm would yield me only head shots and body parts. So my longest lens is a 28mm, and my "normal" is a 24mm. 20mm is getting a little wide for me, but I do use it sometimes. The problem in the street is that since I am such tight quarters with people, most of the time, I'd compromise myself and the moment by bringing the camera up to my face. And since I have relatively ample room for error with a 24mm frame, even at close range, I would rather compromise a bit with composition and if necessary crop a bit later (although I try not to change the dimensions of a 35mm film frame). In fact, I tend to prefer the added element of surprise and chance in my shooting.

In the case of the ice cream couple, however, I can't actually remember for certain, but I am pretty sure I composed as I looked through the viewfinder. This couple had been too caught up in their own interaction to notice me, as he had just completed playfully "stealing" the ice cream cone he had just bought her, and was making a show of walking off and eating her prize, as she looks on in surprised amusement. In retrospect, I don't think there would have been a need for me to shoot from the hip, since they were completely ignoring me.

When I do shoot from the hip, I do sometimes regret the compromise of composition for capturing the moment, but I stand by the choice. The picture below demonstrates exactly what I am talking about, since although composition is clearly compromised, the moment was nearly lost; I maintained only a fragile spontaneity in the shot, which would have been completely lost by raising the camera to my eye. The two young couples are captured in the frame doing very distinct and different things, and there is a sort of interaction going on between both pairs of people – one active and oblivious of being shot, the other being relaxed and totally nonchalant even as they see me shooting them – but the head of the man to the far left is guillotined by my composition. I regret this framing to this day.

"Cool Couple"

The perfect picture would have been possible had the camera been up a little higher – compromising a few inches of her thigh just below the skirtline and everything on that level of the frame would have constituted a painless cropping choice for the benefit of getting the tall man's expression in reaction to his female companion. Her pose is perfect, as she's caught right in the middle of the interaction, her arms perfectly placed – one wrapped around his, the other in a relaxed position of repose – and she's in a relaxed mid-stride that contrasts with his apparent non-chalant or even standoffish stance. To this day, I'll never know what his expression is, and it pains me every time I look at this image.

As for the couple that is the main element of the shot, their "whatever" and "just-don't-care" non-chalance is eminently cool and the fact that they're both catching me in the act is priceless. It defines an intimate moment in which the viewer is made to pay a price for the pleasure of their visual spectatorship. The girl has the appearance on being young, sassy, and sexy – perfectly matched with a cool-as-beans boyfriend who has casually thrown an arm around her, as she instinctively hooks her fingertips upon his.

The two stances and interactions are so great and strike such an interesting contrast to each other that thinking about the cut-off head is downright painful. But on the other hand, had I put the camera to my eye, I am nearly certain that the girl would have instantly moved to cover her face, move out of frame, or otherwise have self-consciously tried to prevent herself from appearing in a picture. The boy may have been more non-plussed about a random camera snapping his shot, but even that isn't certain. In any case, I am sure I would have lost that priceless look of theirs in the time it took me to make the swift motion of bringing the camera up. And making sudden movements with large black objects in close range to complete strangers is not something that is always a good idea to do. Again, in the Korean context, on the Korean street, the rationale behind my techniques seems quite justified.

TROPHIES

Here are some of my favorite street shots, which I think capture both something peculiarly Korean yet also something inherently universal. These are the shots I live for, have displayed in exhibitions and on the Internet, and which have also all received strong positive reactions from both Koreans and non-Koreans. Surely, the pictures can speak for themselves, but since this is a book, they also deserve a bit deeper explanation.

"Ajummas at Rest"

Nothing punctuates life on the Korean street more than the all-powerful, ever-present ajumma. What I found most interesting about these three middle-aged women was the visual rhyme that included all the elements of what I consider to define the true ajumma: the perfectly-rounded, tightly curled perm, the designer-label clothing, as well as the brand-name handbags. The fact that they were all accidentally sitting in the same pose, and moreover, the tallest woman is sitting right in the middle so as to allow a perfect symmetry to take shape, was simply priceless. It was, in its own calm way, one of the most decisive photographic moments I had ever come across.

"Rice Cake Girls"

These middle school girls, the likes of whom I passed by all the time at subway stops such as these, were simply too good to pass up. I actually did, but after hearing their plaintive cries to buy these rice cakes, their fast-and-furious sales pitch, and seeing the perfect symmetry of where they were standing, came back down the stairs to ask them for permission to shoot them. I stepped back and hugged the wall and got as much of them as I could with my 28mm lens – I still had not bought the 24mm that would have given me more room to work with – I was able to get all the important elements into the picture, from the bottom of their homemade cardboard sign to just the tops of their heads. I could have composed the shot vertically, but such a composition would have killed the feeling of the picture; it would have given a lot of meaningless floor and wall space to the girls, but would have totally cut out the feeling of where they were, right in the middle of people ascending and descending to their destinations. With the additional, accidental element added by the girl on the right swinging her rice cakes bag into a slight blur, the entire picture became less static. In terms of certain people who define everyday life here in Seoul, these girls, as well as countless girls like them, are simply it. These are the parts of Seoul that make life here uniquely Seoulful.

"Sticker Frenzy"

Here is a different aspect of the hustle-bustle, frenzied feeling I get in Seoul, whether I am aurally assaulted by the sounds of traffic or that of doumi (narrator-models) trying to force me into a new Paris Baguette through the pure power of their speakers, or am frustrated by being caught in heavily-congested traffic. These stickers are the visual echo of this kind of frenzied confusion, which is why the stickers struck my eye. However, you might notice that the stickers, despite being so numerous, were actually stuck up in a somewhat orderly fashion. Conveying a feeling of frenzy happened through the composition as well, by shooting from below and at an angle. Had I taken a straight shot of a wall of stickers, it would have been boring.

This shot is a good example of the meaning that a photographer adds to even the "raw" reality; Of course, I photographed the wall as-is. But the reality is still filtered through my eye, personal agenda, and sense of aesthetics. This picture is a great example of the relationship between "fact" and interpretation; the reality isn't any less "true" or "real" here because I chose a particular way to frame it, because I don't alter picture elements or in any way set up my shots. Everything in the picture is as I found it; I simply felt what I thought was a reasonable feeling as to what the stickers truly might be argued to represent. In short, I frame reality in a certain way, but don't alter it. I simply try to get across what are, to me, obvious messages about certain scenes. My photography helps me convey those messages more clearly. This is a way of thinking that I hope readers of this book might think about when looking at many of my pictures.

"Stolen Glance"
(Click on this picture to enlarge it)

One of the most playful of this set is the picture of the busy deliveryman catching a not-so-subtle glance at the woman standing waiting for a friend in Namdaemun. The sideways glance is best seen and completely obvious when this picture is printed large, or viewed up close. As you will see later in this chapter, the idea of glances and constant gazing will come up again as an important part of how I argue Seoul's public spaces are defined. Space and how it is defined, is important, as we shall see.

"Unknown Soldier"

One of the shots that I had initially skipped over as it had not initially made a strong impression on me, it soon became apparent to me that this was one of the favorites of more Koreans, who take note of just how much this soldier seems to resemble a statue. He sits alone, likely quite drunk and sleepy, in the harsh light of the subway station light as a bus passes by in a blur anticipated by the photographer and enabled by a slower shutter speed. The bus obviously denotes where the man is, while it also connotes the passage of time and the fact that he seems to missing, if not that bus, something similar that could get him home, assuming that is where he wants to go. It helps that my daylight-balanced film caught this shot, since it accentuated the intensity of the green color, which added quite a bit to the effect.

"In Transit"

One of my favorite shots and the main image used for my fashion show this woman exemplifies motion itself, which was actually the theme of one of my exhibits, and a minor theme that runs throughout all of my photo work. The composition is what strikes me the most about the image, as well as the very lucky way I caught her in midstride, which the slight motion blur that connotes that she is actually in motion. One doesn't have the time to think much when rushing to capture such a moment, so luck often plays as much role in getting certain images as other factors.

"Princess"

Another favorite, this picture foreshadows another aspect of the public spaces in Seoul, especially in terms of how the knowledge of others' gaze, the pressure to put oneself on display, as well as how these considerations define a certain kind of consumption, are all discussed in detail later in this chapter. For now, take most note of the girl's sassy swagger, her clothes, her being caught up in herself in this public place, as well as the subtle natural commentary that is made by the ad with an image of Disney's classic princess in the background, right in front of her. This picture conveys a lot of things, such as the feeling and texture of the drab grays of the street, how these contrast with the affected beauty of the girl in pink and black, which all seem to suggest the incongruity of her vain act of grooming in the space she finds herself in.

"Salaryman"

In this final picture, we see a typical salaryman who we assume is on his way back home from a long day. This picture conveys a lot, in terms of the path he still has left to go, the emptiness of the street, as well as the way the street lamps light his way home even as they seem to loom over and constrict the space around him. They are also a shrill reminder of the fact that it is nighttime, it is extremely late, and he is ridiculously alone, as the lights are seemingly working only for his sake. Overall, I got a sense of gloom and despair in this picture, and felt for this guy who was living such a tough life. Perhaps this man actually was just arriving home after an occasional office party; but in terms of his place as a mere picture element, as a part of a moment snapped and made into an artistic statement, the picture is more important than the reality of who the man is and what he is doing. The reality of the entire picture-as-a-statement is also just as real, as the elements convey a message more meaningful and bigger than just that of "a man standing at a crosswalk." This picture is nothing else than a statement about an entire way of life.

DESCENDING FURTHER, LOOKING CLOSER: THE KOREAN STREET

For a lot of reasons, Seoul is actually a photographic heaven, even if we have labeled it a metaphorical "Hell" of a place to live. Like many of the cities that inspired some of the great photographers of both yesterday and today – Paris, New York, Chicago – Seoul is a "perfect storm" of all the right factors combining in just the right way to make for a special, volatile mix. This city has one of the highest population densities in the world (take a look at Myeongdong on a weekend afternoon), and its landscape is so diverse, considered in terms of the dense, old streets of everyday neighborhoods, which stand in sharp contrast to the stark braggadocio with which the Tower Palace apartments seem to jut into the sky in the neighborhood of Dogok. The difference between Seoul both north and south of the Han River is almost great enough to define two separate cities, both in appearance and atmosphere; the people who live and work in these two areas tend towards difference as well.

In Seoul, there are the well-coifed and meticulously kept housewives who keep the high-class Shinsaegae Department Store in business, as well as similar-aged women who hawk their various wares and trinkets on vinyl mats on the sidewalks outside of subway stations. In addition to the rich and poor, you can see the generation gap between young and old, with old women stooped over from lack of calcium and hard labor, being passed on the streets by pretty young girls with long legs and backs made straight by the good nutrition and leisurely lifestyle enjoyed by any developed nation. This is a country in which many people still spit on the sidewalks (something against which there were national campaigns to stop in the first years of the 1900's), yet one can also expect to find a wireless internet connection almost anywhere where there is a crowd.

The collision of old and new, traditional and modern – these themes have been talked about in regard to Seoul and Korea to such an extent that I don't really need to dwell upon it in depth here. But one thing that needs to be pointed out is that photographically, the contrasts and contradictions, the crowds and constant congestion, combined with the everyday clamor of rush hour, people bumping into other, the frustration caused by long lines, or waiting for a late friend – these are what makes Seoul a heaven to a photographer. The landscape captures something essentially Korean in this mish-mash of everything from pre- to post-modern. The developed landscapes of Paris or New York, no matter how old and charming those two urban areas (as modern cities, they are far older than Seoul, actually, especially considering the physical destruction of the Korean War, as well as the fact that much of modern Seoul didn't exist before the 1970's), cannot compare to Seoul. The essence of Korea's story, in terms of its compressed development and being the most quickly modernized and developed nation in the world, can be told by watching its people, knowing its streets.

"Namdaemun Crossing"

I could stand at a single pedestrian intersection in the middle of Myeongdong for an hour and burn through 50 rolls of film if I really wanted to. In fact, as a street photographer who needs to predict somewhat in advance where good pictures might happen, places where people literally come together and bump into one another are extremely attractive. Also, since Korea, for intents and purposes, doesn't have named and numbered streets, people tend to meet in front of known landmarks when making appointments with friends, e.g. "Meet me in front of the Avatar Building in Myeongdong at 7." One of my favorite spots, which is both a place of congestion as well as a meeting point, is the rear entrance to the Hyundai Department Store in Sinchon, next to the Synnara Record Store. There is a place where you can see frustrated men and women waiting on significant others to show up, but it is also one of the most confusing and busy intersections in the city. People are busy crossing, holding hands with partners, running to greet friends, and sometimes even jumping up and down with glee upon seeing an old acquaintance after a long time. Sometimes, random elements – people and styles – seem to just cross in interesting ways.

Let me offer an example of how this works when I'm out shooting. In the following picture, I was standing outside of the Hyundai Department Store rear entrance, where a lot of people go in and out, back and forth, cross paths, and bump into one another while trying to meet a friend or get to where they're going. When I saw the woman with the puppy slowly heading out with a bright red umbrella in hand, I got into ready mode just in case she became an interesting picture element, which she looked like she had the potential to be. With the puppy in one arm and the blood-red umbrella in the other, I was hopeful.

Here is the heart of street photography – the pleasure in the hunt – which is found in anticipating picture elements in advance and capturing the exact instant when that element just happens to line up with another one to make for an interesting picture.

When I saw her open her umbrella and slowly edge out to look for the party she was obviously supposed to be meeting, I started edging around her to get in a position to line her up with perhaps an interesting passersby with whom she could contrast, or perhaps another bright color that could go along her the strong red element. Of course, this thought process is not as precise and calculating as it sounds when I write about it now – this all takes place in the realm of instinct, while waiting for that fleeting instant. When the two uniformed officers walked by, I took the shot, when I saw these elements all add up to something interesting, even though the dog just happened to get lost a little with a similarly-colored background element, which detracts from its power as a picture element. But I love the woman's searching expression, being caught absent-mindedly adjusting her purse, the strength of the color of her bright red umbrella, as well as the sharp contrast between two, totally unrelated picture elements (the uniformed officers and a woman waiting for a friend) that are individually somewhat interesting, but become something altogether new when put together.

This is the pleasure of the everyday moment that is so difficult to catch. How do you make the mundane interesting photographically? How do you straddle the line between a picture with a universally appealing meaning and what is particularly interesting only to Koreans? These are the most difficult questions to intellectually answer, but are sometimes so easy to see in the instant of a "decisive moment" when the elements of the universal and particular converge, something that usually happens when all the right elements of a scene converge to urge the photographer to push the shutter button at that particular instant. To put it simply, when you are a photographer, you simply "know it when you see it." Often, it's difficult to define, but easy to see.

But even as I was already shooting in late 2002 and 2003, I found myself lacking in knowledge of Korean photographic history, so I first toured the shelves of major bookstores to see what was being published. I needed to get a feel for what had been done and what had not, as well as sense of how Korean photographers felt the rhythms of their own streets. To be honest, much of the “documentary” work I found was mediocre. Much of it resembled promotional brochures, largely sponsored either for the Korean Tourism Commission, rather than attempts to honestly document a certain slice of reality.

Without an active culture of candid street photography, there is a potentially lost heritage here in Seoul, if only simply because this city and its culture is so complex, rich, and fascinating as a place to be, as well as to photograph. On top of the fact that street photography is such a sorely neglected, yet honestly beautiful mode of expression and art, one that can record and tell so much about a place and a people, Seoul's status as a heavenly place to photograph is a difficult one to challenge.
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But I did run across gems from time to time, and they seemed to be the ongoing works of just a few people. One of the most striking was that of Kim Ki Chan's, with whose work I became familiar after arriving in Korea, looking around the Internet, and exploring many bookstores. And after a year of having shot and published here in Korea, I felt my experience had prepared me to handle meeting a figure like Kim Gi Chan, arguably one of Korea's most important photographers, in an interview for an English-language magazine based here in Seoul.

Not only did I find his work compelling, but his focus on the one subject of the golmok - the street, the back alleys of Seoul – was fascinating to me in terms of his tenacity about the subject. He didn't shoot anything else. In the forward to Mr. Kim’s sixth photo book, critic Lee Young Joon identified the importance of the golmok to understanding something essential about Korea: it is in the cramped spaces of the tiny houses, as well as in the small alleyways and streets that separate them, that Koreans grew accustomed to greeting, talking, and arguing with one another.

Like the rural areas and small towns that still exist outside of Seoul, the golmok provided a communal and close atmosphere. But in old Seoul, in the cramped urban landscape of thousands of golmoks all pushed together -- with voices, bodies, and personal possessions all crunched into one another -- was the vitality and character of urban Korean existence located. This is an aspect of Seoul that has almost been completely erased today, in a city lined with übermodern high-rise apartment complexes, “mansions,” and “villas”. Importantly, these "modern" places are denoted by terms borrowed from English, which carry with them connotations of "Western." Such places are ostensibly cleaner, having all the modern bells and whistles, but they are relatively lonely and soulless. In this way, the golmok initially struck and captured Kim Ki Chan’s eye and has held it ever since.

But when I interviewed him, Mr. Kim explained that he never had the intention of becoming the documentor of an entire way of life; in fact, he never intended to become a photographer, since he was not one, by trade, to begin with. In fact, he added that he did not consider himself a “professional” even in the present day.

Mr. Kim originally started working as a cameraman for KBS back in 1966, shooting documentaries for that station. In talking with Mr. Kim, he was not really able to identify a particular reason why he decided to start still photography as a hobby, nor why his interest in the golmok started to focus down so tightly. Interestingly, Mr. Kim says that it actually took him a few years to find a theme, which he stumbled upon after taking pictures in various markets around Seoul. But he realized that these pictures were all the same, much as I myself have the same trouble finding unique shots in the places most foreigners (or Korean amateur photographers, for that matter) initially find interesting here: Namdaemun, Insadong, Myungdong, Itaewon. I found it necessary to take a different angle, to find my own way of putting down on film something that I think says something significant about Korea, or typifies a Korean way of life. This is exactly what Kim Ki Chan says he found in the golmok way back in the mid-1960s, and he has not been able to stop taking pictures since.

<INSERT KIM KI CHAN SHOT OF BASEBALL KIDS>

But thirty years taking pictures in the same places, along the same theme? When I asked Mr. Kim whether there must have been some unique psychological connection he was making with the people he found in the poor neighborhoods of Korea, and whether it maybe it had something to do with having grown up poor as well, his answer was simple: the golmok had a certain kind of warmth and “humanity” that could not be duplicated anywhere else, something with which he simply connected as a person, “on a human level.” As soon as I heard these words, I instantly knew what he was saying, and I replied that a similar kind of atmosphere existed in many African American communities, with I remember from my own youth, which was filled with more aunties, uncles, and cousins than I could shake a stick at.

But how could someone as accomplished as Kim Ki Chan still think of himself as an “amateur?” Kim defined the difference between an amateur and professional as being able to make money and live off your work. I like to define it the way my former instructor, the noted photo documentarian Ken Light, does: a photographer “is always shooting.” It’s a simple, but elegant distinction between the so-called “amateur” and “professional.” You see in the negatives evidence of commitment to a subject. An “amateur” has negatives with many different frames: the family dog, shots of yesterday’s office party, or pictures of mom standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. A real photographer’s negatives look almost alike, like a strip taken from a movie reel, as the camera searches for what Henri Cartier-Bresson calls “the decisive moment.”

"Made to Wait"

A professional takes the same or similar shots again, again, and again, or will wait nearly 45 minutes for the elements to come together, as I did in the picture of the girl above, who only looked at her watch twice during the whole time I waited for the right moment when she looked at the watch while she was not blocked by the many passersby. More than anything else, that kind of perseverance is what defines the true photographer, not how you make your money, whether you have a degree in the field, or whether you have even ever published any of your work.

If you have spent entire rolls of precious and expensive film trying to get just the right expression from a couple having a conversation at the next table, or schoolkids running after a bus, you can call yourself a photographer. And when I look at Kim Ki Chan’s work, it goes without saying that he is, simply by virtue of wanting to be, an eminent professional. If you spend three entire decades tenaciously shooting the same subject, you are probably a master of your particular craft. It is just a question of whether one is recognized for his or her work that separates those who get gallery exhibits from those whose negatives simply collect dust in a drawer. In the end, it is simply a matter of commitment – not equipment, lenses, or megapixels of resolution – that separates weekend photographers from true professionals.

Indeed, the problem of earning a living dogs all photographers, but in Korea, for the documentary photographer, the difficulty of living off of one's own work is much more pronounced. Art and commercial photography simply dominate the photographic scene here. There simply aren’t that many photographers who do solely documentary work, because it’s hard to pay the bills. Even Mr. Kim chuckled as he addressed a group of visitors to his exhibit in 2004, asking “who can live on such work?” But there is something else going on here. In Korea, there was actually a large body of work, especially from the post-war period through the 1960s, documenting the hard times that had befallen this country. A trip to the Korean National Museum of Art, a perusal of a good book on the history of photography in Korea, or a look through much of the anthropological photography done by Westerners at the time should make this clear. But why is there such a glaring absence of a genre of documentary photography in Korea? A quick look at recent Korean history offers one possible answer.

In 1953, Korea was literally the poorest country in the world, stricken by war, and for that reason was also the most photographed place in the world as well, much like present-day Afghanistan or Iraq. From many present-day Koreans, there is a sense of wanting to get out from under the shadow of the dreary, less prosperous Korea, a time and place that was documented all too well. It is for this reason that I think I have not been able to find a single documentary photo book on the IMF period, although it was clearly one of the most significant moments in Korean modern history, something that left no Korean unaffected. But photo books about the World Cup abound. The range of possibilities for documentary photography is largely limited by how Korea likes to imagine itself, and the IMF period reeks too much of the time when Korea was a poor, dependent nation. It struck a nerve that most people had simply decided to forget was there – and if you’re a photographer doing such work, you likely won’t get much work. This popular context affected how Kim’s work would be received as well.

Kim shot in the golmok for more than a decade before even putting on an exhibit. His motivations were pure, as he had picked up the camera because he had found an almost inexplicable desire to document a particular lifestyle with which he felt a strangely intense connection. When he started to become well-known in the 1980s and through the 1990s, this overlapped with the time that Korea’s growth, development, and construction were at a peak. Suddenly, Korea seemed to be concerned with what it had “lost,” as exemplified in the popular concern about recovering “traditional” things. College kids started playing traditional drums in large numbers, shamans of the kut were back in style, and in 1992 Seopyeonje became the most popular movie in Korean cinematic history, much to the surprise of its director. It is around this time that Kim realized, in his own sphere, that the neighborhoods he was documenting were truly going to vanish altogether, so he began what I think is the most interesting part of his golmok photography – taking new pictures of former subjects, mostly children, whom he had photographed years earlier. It is not only a document of the growth of individual people, but of the country itself, as many of the pictures of former children posing on the stoop of a small, dilapidated house are now coupled with a shot of the same person as an adult, but now standing in the parking lot of an ultra-modern apartment complex, sometimes in the very same neighborhood.

I presently live in Gongdeok, next to a train track that runs adjacent to a quaint little strip of old-fashioned Seoul, something that always struck my fancy when I came to live here last year. It was only after going through Kim Ki Chan’s work that I realized my neighborhood hides one of the last remnants of the golmok neighborhood that used to define this area. People remark that this picture reminds them of an older, poorer Korea. Some Koreans even say that they dislike this picture because it casts a negative, non-representative light on a "real" Korea that's no longer like that. I simply assert that these are the kids I see all the time on my way home, that this is still "real" as anyplace else. Are those children not real? Their reactions to me? Yes, Korea is now a land of high-rise apartments made of concrete and glass, but these people are not any less "real." They are simply the people that many Koreans would like to forget exist. One might even argue that some Koreans want to forget that they ever existed at all.

"Fascination, Fear, and Indifference"
Gongdeok-dong, 2003

Even now, a new apartment complex has just been completed in front of my similarly new officetel, and several more are under construction in every direction around me; I get the distinct feeling that it hasn’t been too long since the old neighborhoods that were once the heart of this place have been erased and built over. According to Mr. Kim, Korea’s first major apartment complex, built by Samsung, started right behind the Holiday Inn (formerly the Garden Hotel) in Mapo, where there had been nothing but squat little houses of the golmok as far as the eye could see. Having come to Korea for the first time in 1994, I still remember how the sea of developed, modern buildings were punctuated by islands of so-called “squatter’s villages”, as they were described to me. I only remember this now since it has been pointed out to me; like many Koreans, I too found it all too easy to forget that Seoul once looked very different than it does now.

There is certainly an air of inevitability in Korea around so-called “progress” and the notion of becoming a sungjinguk, a “developed country.” Even Mr. Kim shared it. When I asked him what he thought about the state of Korea’s “national character”, now that what Lee Young Joon had named as its source – the old neighborhood – had all but disappeared in Seoul. Mr. Kim simply chuckled and shrugged as he answered, saying that the problem was not that of Korea’s national character becoming diluted or disappearing, despite what the art critic in his book might have said. He countered with a follow-up question: “Would America’s national character fade away if Harlem were to disappear?” Of course not, was the unstated answer. But Mr. Kim made clear that he certainly acknowledged that part of the warmth and “humanity” that defines an older way of life in Korea is disappearing, along with urban development’s erasure of old ways of living. It has now, according to him, been replaced by a culture of “individualism.” He lamented that while this was frustrating for him on a personal level, how can one stop development? So the Korean national character is not disappearing – Mr. Kim would say that it is merely changing, evolving. He adds that the golmok is a munhwa yusan – a “cultural treasure” - and in that way, its disappearance is inevitable.

"Makkoli Man"
Shinchon, 2003

I saw in this moment the answer to the question of why I think Kim Ki Chan does this kind of photography in the first place – the golmok itself is a symbol of Korea’s past – even though it hadn’t quite disappeared yet – and the act of photographing it, for Kim, must have always been an act of preservation. Like many Koreans, there is lamenting over the perceived losses of old ways of living and thinking, but there is scarcely any question that those old ways must inevitably give way to the new. In this way, looking at Mr. Kim’s photography, one can easily discern the way his style was very much a simple and conscious record of the people and spaces of the golmok; there are all kinds of different documentary approaches that a photographer could have taken in those spaces, perhaps closely focusing on the lifestyles of a few representative types of people there, or emphasizing the residents’ relative poverty, or perhaps their contentment in living a simple life. But more than anything, Kim Ki Chan’s style is that of recorder – it is defined by his effort to make extensively document a lifestyle that most Koreans consider to be a mere turnstile along the long road of becoming “developed.” Mr. Kim’s efforts to go back, accelerate his work, and revisit his subjects came at the same time Korea’s efforts to eliminate the neighborhoods similarly picked up in pace. Mr. Kim’s assumptions about the need to move forward are little different from many of his countrymates. These assumptions define his style clearly, even as it makes the work all the more valuable as a cultural record of a nation that has become increasingly eager to forget its colonized, dependent, and impoverished past as it move into a bright and ostentatiously-developed future.

"Time Machine"

To boil down Mr. Kim’s response to my final question, in which I wondered what representative things, from a Westerner’s perspective, one might photograph in Korea now that the golmok in Seoul are largely gone, he answered by saying, “There’s nothing ‘representative’ to take pictures of in Korea, and my pictures are also not ‘representative’ of anything. There is only the everyday.” This was one of the most important and affirming phrases I had ever heard in regard to my work, and it gave me a lot of confidence to look even deeper into the street, as well as feel more confident about my authority as a photographer in Korea. Looking at Kim's work and choice of subjects, then at my own, I can’t help but agree, and also see resonances that transcend both time and international boundaries, that straddle both the particular and the universal.

Kim Ki Chan, 1975.

Garry Winogrand, 1961.

Michael Hurt, 2003.

But there is still a major problem that I work against all the time; as a photographer in Korea, I had started to realize that Koreans are often very sensitive to photographs and photographers. As I started thinking more closely about Korean recent history, as well as the way photography and Westerners came into contact in Korea, the fact that there isn't much of a tradition of street photography as a genre unto itself started to make a lot more sense.

Indeed, photographs of the everyday – street photography – is a tradition that many in the West might be familiar with, whereas in Korea, this photographic genre is far less familiar. One might imagine a gruff, wiry man standing on a street corner in Paris, alternatively looking through and adjusting a boxy, black-silver Leica. Robert Doisneau's classic shot of a couple stealing a kiss in the middle of a busy plaza (a staged shot, by the way), which graces the walls of many freshman dorm rooms in the United States, might come to mind as we watch our imaginary French photographer take pictures of passersby.

"Kiss By the Hotel de Ville"
Robert Doisneau, 1950

But in Korea, even as a foreigner who appears to be a tourist, there is a great suspicion of people with cameras taking pictures of people unknown to them. Even before the unfortunate advent of the camera phone, I found that, after the occasional times I was caught taking pictures of people on the street, that there was true hostility and suspicion of photographic activities that were not deemed "artistic" or journalistic in nature.

The flip side of Korean people's general suspicion of random people with cameras is that with a company or call sign on your person or behind your name, photographers are granted incredible, incredible authority. If you have ever seen Korean photojournalists, wedding photographers, or broadcast news camera operators at work, you would know that they are far more aggressive than their foreign counterparts, even to the point of interfering with or actually restaging key photographic moments, something that tends to go way past the understood line of photo ethics in the West.

I tend to think that part of this is due to the fact that there is very little room for and hence common knowledge of entire genres of photography within Korea, these being documentary and street photography. Even to the present day, with some notable exceptions, there are very few photographers in Korea who could be identified primarily as documentary or street photographers; many commercial and art photographers profess to "dabble" in it from time to time, a fact that actually demonstrates how unseriously this genre is taken, even by photographers. Street photography is generally not considered difficult to do, and hence not worth doing exclusively. Or perhaps that rationale actually works in the reverse – it doesn't really matter, actually. With the exception of Kim Ki Chan, I can't name many examples of documentary/street photographers in Korea who are not just moonlighting newspaper photojournalists, or commercial/art photographers. But in the West, I could make a list as long as my arm. Sebastio Selgado, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, and Garry Winogrand are just a few contemporary names that come into my head without even thinking hard; where are Korea's photo documentarians today?

Of course this imbalance of awareness of the documentary street photography genre is surely related to the history of imperialism, racism, and the roots of Western anthropologists' desires to record, categorize, and intellectually subjugate their non-Western subjects. And surely, much of Koreans' distrust of outsiders with cameras goes back to both Western, as well as Japanese, efforts to symbologically, and thereby photographically, subjugate Korean subjects. This is another lingering, communal bad memory – such as of bare-chested Korean women in hanboks giving toothy smiles while breastfeeding plump, naked babies – that probably laid the foundation, especially among older people, for most Koreans' distrust of unofficial photographers who don't seem to have a clear and obvious reason for taking their picture.

Korea: Between War and Freedom, 1954

This is Okinawa, 1954

The gaze of the West is apparent here, whether dealing with Japan or Korea. It really doesn't matter – both sources of photographic subjects are the same from the point of view of German, American, or any other many photographers who came from comfortable European countries. These people look pitiable, strange, and very, very foreign. The objects of these photographers' gaze come across as alien as could be. So the legacy of this colonial/anthropological/western gaze, in addition to many other factors too numerous to list here, go into explaining why there isn't a big market for photo books of everyday Koreans on the streets; it has left a bad taste in the collective mouth of the Korean people.

In almost any American bookstore, one might be able to easily find large, beautifully-designed, hardback photo books on a variety of serious subjects that cost upwards of $60 to $100. They aren't necessarily bestsellers, but such "coffee table" books are often bought, collected, and proudly displayed by lots of people with disposable income. Although it's a hard to make it to the top, one can make a living by doing reality-as-art or pictures-as-social-documentary kind of photography. In America, the "photo essay" as a respected genre or form has a history that goes back to Life, Look, and many other photo magazines from the 1940's and 1950's; many Americans learned about the rest of the world through the photographs of periodicals such as National Geographic during this time as well.

On the other hand, Koreans at that time were experiencing the aftermath of the colonial period and the Korean War; unfortunately, most of the pictures from this time, taken by some great Korean street/documentary photographers from that time, are now pictures that many South Koreans, who would like their country to be known for semi-conductor microprocessors, cool cellphones, Internet connectivity, and formerly, being on the cutting edge of stem-cell research – would like to forget.

"Looking for Work," Myeongdong, 1953.
Lim Eung Sik

What this picture is a stark reminder of, even more than it was around the time it was taken, is the extreme poverty that defined the Korean past, even as it suggests that there was something more there, as exemplified by the seemingly financially comfortable and successful men in suits meeting and shaking hands in the background. It accentuates the dire straits of the main who is the obvious subject of the photograph, and provide a little bit of needed context. For the present-day viewer, one might take the figures in the back to be the brighter future of Korea, while the fate of the man in the front, at least from a historical viewpoint, is no longer important. The "we" of now are represented in the two men shaking hands, while the poor fellow in the front becomes the "we" of the past whom we would like to forget ever existed.

But there is something essentially different about the picture of the unemployed man, which was taken by a Korean photographer who was simply trying to document the reality of his era, than those taken by the westerners described above. The images taken by Koreans don't connote a feeling of an outsider looking down, as was all-too-often, inevitably so in the case of those Westerners, nor were these images being used for nefarious ideological purposes, as was the case for many of the Japanese who came to Korea and used the images of poverty, undeveloped cities, and destitution to help justify the eventual colonization of Korea. No, the Korean photographers' gaze was quite different, although the subject matter may have been similarly depressing: post-war poverty, complete with images of the jobless, the rural countryside, smiling peasant women with their children.

No, these pictures were taken out of love, not derision or a sense of condescension. Against the backdrop of poverty, or bombed out buildings, or sun-burnt farmers' faces, the pictures seemed to celebrate the streets, everyday people, Korean life. This was the essential difference between the colonial gaze of the Japanese and the familial gaze of Korean photographers who shot during Korea's post-war development.

"Curiosity."
Aeogae, Seoul, 1960.
Son Gyu Mun

"Street Show Market"
Namdaemun, Seoul, 1967.
Lee Hyeong Rok

Many of the pictures that would define a strong tradition of documentary/street photography in Korea come from a time that seems alien to many modern Koreans, the younger of whom can't imagine a Korea without computers and cellphones. In fact, pictures from the rubble of the 1950's, the developing 1960's, and the ramshackle 1970's in Korea now constitute an affront to newer notions of "Korean pride" itself.

Shin Su-dong, Seoul, 1957.
Jeong Beom Tae

Such thinking was echoed in one of the very few photo books that deals with street photography, called Seoul: 1996-1999, written by Jeon Mong Gak. I first picked it up almost as soon as I arrived, back in 2002, but it unfortunately exemplifies all the factors I have talked about thus far in regards to why street photography continues to be one of the most neglected and maligned genre of photography in Korea. I don't intend to be mean with this critique of this work, but as a serious and dedicated street photographer who laments the fact that so much of this great city's character and history remain largely unrecorded, I strongly feel that it would be helpful to point some things out.

In terms of getting street photography published, there aren't many venues in which to do it. However, upon seeing this photo book, published on magazine paper, with pictures crammed together with little thought to design, over around 250 pages, I was actually quite shocked at how cavalierly such a book could be published. But what really surprised me was when I bought the book – and I encourage you to do so, if only to better understand this critique and support the artistic efforts of a fellow photographer with whom I have no quarrel personally – I was even more deeply surprised after looking through the content. The book was an exercise in what I think street and documentary photography should not be, as well as demonstrating exactly the reasons why people continue to not take this valuable genre seriously.

First of all, the time period in which Jeon took his pictures were a crucial moment in Korea's history. He himself describes this fact in the foreword to his book, which was, interestingly enough, written in both Korean and English:

"Unfortunately, at the end of the 20th century, Seoul is still in the throes of the so-called IMF crisis, reputed to be the worst national crisis since after the Korean War. Not to mention the statistical numbers, the rising jobless loiter on the streets, in the parks and subway stations. Roadside stalls and movable pubs blossomed along the back alley to tell us how many those there are."

I instantly thought to myself, upon reading those words, "How could you not document that?" The jobless and the homeless, the rise of people trying to make a living selling food in street stands, as well as the people drowning out their sorrows in the outdoor drinking tents that lined the streets at that time. But even beyond those obvious stories and pictures, which were well covered by print and photo journalists at the time, what about the myriad other stories that could have been told through the camera? Beyond the obvious low morale that people must have been feeling at the time, real photographers with time on their hands – Jeon was a retiree who decided to take up his "hobby" after a long career in the university, something I will make note about later – could have better served their country's history by recording the struggles and hardships of the people at the time.

Some of the most defining photographs of America's history come from photographs taken during the Great Depression era. Dorothea Lange's unforgettable image of her "Migrant Mother" is not only a defining part of American identity, but in itself a universal symbol of perseverance in the face of almost unsurmountable hardship. It speaks to both the specific need America had at that time for signs of hope, while also possessing a universal aesthetic and emotional appeal. It is one of the most powerful images ever put onto film:

"Migrant Mother"
Nipoma, CA, 1936.
Dorothea Lange

Importantly, this image and thousands like it were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration as part of President Roosevelt's "New Deal" reform and redress package, and are now part of the government's permanent collection – the period was recognized as one of the most important in our country's – American – history; yes, it was a difficult time, but outside of the difficulty of the immediate moment, it was a time worth recording for posterity. These images and the faces within them speak out across the decades. Long after any of the individuals alive in that time have passed away, we have a part of them with us.

Alive and photographing at a similar moment in Korean history, and with ample time on his hands, Jeon purposely took not a single picture of anything related to the IMF. He writes in the same foreword I quoted above:

"...I have no intention whatsoever to close up [focus on] the most deprived group or class and campaign for them. In that sense I refused to mimick either our realist photographers after the War, or F.S.A. photographers of America during the Great Depression of the 1920's, but tried to capture the universal turn-of-the-century Seoul. Political or social turmoils or incidents were not of my concern and turned over to mass media's share [left for the mass media to cover.]"

While I respect his choice, to speak quite frankly, I think this attitude is at the same time historically, photographically, and ethically irresponsible. Of course, the mass media is taking certain shots that fit the stories of the day, but are there many dedicated photographers doing deep and humane coverage of the problem? Especially a retiree, who obviously thought photography a pursuit worthy of seriously undertaking as a retirement hobby activity, but who had all the time in the world on his hands – one would hope that such a person could have been one of these photographers. Everyone has a right to his or her choices, of course, but I simply using this example of a huge missed opportunity to illustrate that there is an unfortunate pattern here.

It is not only his decision to avoid the most important historical and photographic topic in half a century that I have issues with; it is also the fact that the pictures he did take were so utterly unable to capture anything of real importance about this city, Seoul. His book – which, again, I do recommend you buy and look at yourself – was fascinating to me because it was a clear case in which an insider, a Korean man who had lived in this society for decades, seemed to have absolutely no clear sense of what he was trying to capture about his home city. The work is a hodge-podge of seemingly random images that are, tellingly, organized according to neighborhoods and even streets in sequential order.

I used his text as a teaching tool when I taught photo classes in the Seoul alternative schools, and I think Jeon's text is of great use here as well. I sympathize with Jeon quite a bit, actually, because I find myself so unable to take good pictures when I am in my home country. I go to the shopping mall, cafes, and other places that I know well and am so uninterested in my environment that it becomes a chore to try and take good pictures. Even some of the best work done on documenting the culture of the United States – Robert Frank's The Americans is the perfect example – was done by Frank, an immigrant who still felt the need to travel across America, which he did on his Guggenheim grant.

In the end, in order to document one's own society meaningfully, from the photo works I have seen from or about any country, the best have always been created by people who were outsiders-as-immigrants or foreigners, or native photographers who made themselves outsiders by taking trips outside of their familiar surroundings, or also native photographers who were possessed of a particular and peculiar vision of the kinds of images they wanted to make about their own society.

The native photographers in this latter category were all people with something particular to say. Jeon's work is completely devoid of such a vision or message, and this is why it utterly fails to say anything meaningful at all about Seoul, its people, or the character of his city. It reads as a personal photo album, like the work of a visitor. This is the most surprising thing: that almost all of Jeon's work looks like the pictures foreign tourists might take; it is only in this sense, and this sense alone, that Jeon meets his own goal of taking pictures that are "universal." Herein lies the irony – that many of his shots resemble those of non-Korean and other people who were never able to "enter" Korea beyond the superficial level at which we began our descent at the beginning of this book. In the end, they are, with the exception of the nearly racist gaze that he exhibits in his endless pictures of "strange" foreigners in Itaewon, truly universal in their utter meaninglessness. In this way, his pictures share the limited interest and lack of vision that World Cup photo books have. After the fact, and outside of the moment, who cares?

But beyond my criticisms of Jeon, and even the individual shots of my own of which I am most proud, to this point I haven't explicitly talked about the patterns I do see in Korea, the rhythms of the street that that define Korea's reality today, in terms of some overarching, greater patterns of Korean life. Kim Ki Chan – he saw "Korea" in the golmok, a place that he tracked and documented in Seoul, even as it was disappearing. For him, life in this place defined a whole part of the Korean character itself, created by the harsher conditions and inevitable intimacy of living in such close quarters with one's friends, family, and neighbors.

But what defines Seoul in the present day? Is it a place? Is there anything especially Korean about downtown Seoul that is fundamentally different from Paris or New York? Nowadays, given the lack of a singular experience that defines life for a lot of people, and also given the fact that Korea has inevitably become much more similar than it had been to international metropolises around the world – what can we say truly defines this place? Here is where the foreign eye can be especially helpful, as it can break through the haze of daily, mundane details that natives often find it difficult to see through in their own cultures.

So what do I see? Where do I see difference and something that one could define as peculiar to Korea? In the public space of the street, I see people engaged in various kinds of socializing in a way that one doesn't see in the boring suburbs of America, nor even in the streets on New York City. The Korean street is veritably alive with activity in a way I could only define as a "playground" (놀이터) for adults. And in these streets, I mostly see couples, women, and men engaged in various kinds of socialization-through-consumption that is often loud and even raucous. In the play space that are the bars, family restaurants, room salons, hofs, game and PC rooms, love motels, saunas, fast food restaurants, and even the red light districts, the Korean "outside" defines a place where people here can behave quite differently than when they are on the "inside," at their office desks, service counters, information booths, auto garages, taxis and buses, and other places where people do work.

"Office Party" (translate simply as "회식")

And the other place in between the outside "playground" and the inside social network of coworkers, colleagues, and peers is that of lonliness. In this way, often point out how unusual Koreans think it to be if one eats by himself, goes to a movie by oneself, or gets a drink alone before going home from work. Much less than I feel in America, in order to feel comfortable in the public "playground," one should not be alone. I have almost never seen a single female eating alone in an Outback, nor do I see people socializing in that space at all, without someone else to join them.The irony of the moment was something that could not ignore when deciding to take this picture.

"Happy Times"

In a city the size of Seoul, loneliness is a not an emotion felt only by the dispossessed or socially misfit, but is more of a mode in life. It's simply one of the inevitable rhythms of a place constantly in flux and motion, where we sometimes get caught on our own, between the inside and out. On this particular evening, when I was walking from Myungdong to Chungmuro during an in-between moment of my own, I caught this young woman sitting motionless on a bench, oblivious to the business going on inside the "family restaurant" in front of which she was sitting, as well as to any passersby.

What she is thinking or even the state she is in is something about which I can offer little more than conjecture. I never saw her face and she never moved a muscle while I shot off several frames of her. She may have been catching a snooze before a whole slew of friends arrived, she may have just received a call from her boyfriend informing her that he had found a new love, or she may have just been feeling a bit sick. In the end, who know? What is more important is the impression this particular moment had on me, as well as the emotional color that this particular moment had when I pressed the shutter button.

For me, this picture capture a particular kind of feeling that I get as person who generally walks around this large city alone; in this moment, I felt an instant of connection with another lone soul who seemed to be sharing the lonely mode with me.

"Eating Alone in Itaewon"

What make the picture of the girl on the bench work all the more is the obvious contrast between the apparent loneliness of the main subject and the advertisement behind the bench upon which she is sitting. Roughly translated, the message reads "A restaurant for getting together," and it is interesting to think about the way "family restaurant" has become a concept unto itself. The Korean pronunciation of the English word for restaurant is "res-to-rang" (레스토랑), often understood as a place that serves Western food. This is cognitively different from the Korean word for restaurant, which is shik-dang () and generally refers to a restaurant selling Western food. The concept of "family restaurant" has more to do with large food chains such as TGI Friday's, Outback Steakhouse, or Sizzler, which in Korea have largely become spaces where females go to socialize; in the US, the country of these restuarants' origins, these restaurants are really not very much more than a place to eat.

"Service"

In this and many other ways, the urban and industrialized Korea has come a long way from the times defined by the intimate and personal spaces of the golmok, to the much more impersonal and commodified space of "socialized consumption." In this way, I think that not knowing most of the people you see every day, not even your own neighbors, as is often the case in this country of massive high-rise apartment complexes, fundamentally changes the way Koreans interact with one another. Moreover, in order to socialize, one usually needs money, because in this hyper-capitalist consumer culture, money buys access to the playground. Of course, most people these days can afford this and it has come to seem almost natural, but the facts that this is also a significant change in lifestyle as well as a completely different use of public space, are things worth thinking about.

"Street Trinkets"

This is especially true in regards to the way Kim Ki Chan wistfully looked at the disappearance of the golmok and the end of one aspect of the Korean "national character" itself. The question I am asking here is, "With the death of the golmok, exactly how has "public space" changed the ways Korean see each other and themselves? How has it changed the way people behave? And how has it helped define Korean "national character" itself in the modern age?" The next section is an attempt to answer that question, and I hope it will be one that might have satisfied Kim Ki Chan had I another chance to speak with him. He recently passed away, along with, one might think, the last recorder of a world that has almost disappeared. But I argue that the communal memory of golmok life is not something that fades away so easily, and its traces are still evident in the ways people now occupy and define the spaces of Seoul in a new, modern way that yet still rings with the echoes of an older way of life.

THE PLAYGROUND OF LOVE, DISPLAY, AND CONSUMPTION

LOVE

Seoul certainly doesn't have the romantic reputation of Paris in the springtime, but Seoul is definitely the city for lovers. Everywhere you go, couples abound, and in certain places, touchy-feely pairs are the majority – Shinchon on the weekends springs instantly to mind when thinking of a sea of couples desperately clutching one another while walking around in complete oblivion to everyone else around. On a Sunday afternoon near the new Artreon movie complex, it is difficult to go about one's business alone without being acutely reminded of the fact that one is not part of a heteronormative social coupling.

<ELIMINATED THE TWO PARAGRAPHS IN BETWEEN THESE 2 SENTENCES, AS WELL AS PART OF THE NEXT PARAGRAPH>

For those of you who might not take too much stock in this form of dominance by a majority, let me just suggest that the hegemony of heterosexuality is so complete that even pointing this out smacks of ridiculousness. In any case, what I find interesting in Korea is not the fact of heteronormativity, since this norm and associate behaviors exist everywhere, but rather two particular aspects of it that are particular to the Korean case and to how this is expressed on the streets:

First to consider is the just how much of the public space couples seem to occupy, how much dating, dating, dating is on the minds of the unmarried, and how much social energy seems to be expended towards getting a girl or boyfriend if you don't have one. People always seem to ask each other, quite early in initial social conversations, "Do you have a boy/girlfriend?" as a part of those key questions that people tend to ask each other in Korea in order to know how to talk and deal with one another. Given the hierarchical nature of the language, as well as the class and status-oriented thinking of many people, the fact that one's age, hometown, and where you went to school are first out of the gate is not surprising. But included in the litany of questions asked in order to help guide one's social positioning is that of determining whether or not one is single or not. Older people tend to be obssessively concerned with when single people are going to stop being single, while younger people seem to be curious as to a) whether you should be treated as an