Let’s begin this series with perfect honesty – upon first glance, Seoul is not a pretty nor memorable city. When thinking about the great metropolises of the world – New York, Paris, London, or Rome – certain stock images spring instantly to mind, seemingly out of instinct: the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, or the Colisseum. Or even without structures that overshadow the very cities they hail from, there are entire cityscapes that are just as deeply burned in the world’s imagination, such as is found in the urban wonderland of neon signs and corporate logos that is downtown Tokyo, the stunning architectural wonders defining the skyline of Shanghai, or the quaint charm of the great seaport city of San Francisco.
But Seoul? Are international visitors charmed by the wonders of a building named after a once-impressive (to Koreans) claim to having 63 floors? Does Seoul possess a world-famous marvel of architecture, wonder of engineering, or even a recognizable skyline? In fact, the city seems to possess no particular sense of design at all, since strictly-enforced zoning laws and sensible urban planning are relatively new concepts, as is the practice of building streets in grid patterns, or the careful construction of new buildings. One look at the difference between Seoul north and south of the river is testament to this fact. Kangnam is a relatively ordered lattice of streets, while older, northern Seoul is positively labyrinthine.
Still, I do not mean to be too hard on the city, as I am more than able to acknowledge Seoul’s myriad hidden charms, as well as the fact that there are reasons to fall in love with this peculiar, quirky place. Of course, the taste for Seoul is somewhat acquired, requiring a bit of time to build, just as one might first taste a strange but pleasingly complex wine, or sip an extremely dark beer, or take the first bite of an exotic new food that has an unfamiliar initial punch, but follows up with a pleasant aftertaste that lingers and requires another bite to make sense of what was just tried. And it is in such ways that a new affinity for something is born, out of something that initially seemed strange – or to the eyes and palates of others, downright unpleasant.
So did my affinity for Seoul begin to grow. I, like most other people living in this imposing yet cramped city, did not come to live here completely voluntarily. Many Seoulites were simply born here, while another great many moved here from the countryside in the mass urbanization that happened as Korea modernized. As a foreigner, I originally came to Korea in 1994 on a Fulbright grant and worked in a middle school on Cheju Island for two years before going back to start my Ph.D. work. After receiving another Fulbright to conduct dissertation research in Korea in 2002, I was faced with the fact that I could no longer live in the island paradise that Chejudo bills itself as being, but rather the urban “hell” that is Korea’s capital city. So it was with a literal sense of dread and trepidation that I came to live in Seoul, a city to which I always came for weekends or short trips while I had lived in Chejudo, and so had always thought to myself was the epitome of the clichéd refrain “a nice place to visit, but not to live.”
So what do I mean by describing a city as an urban "hell?"
Seoul is a city of hustle and bustle, dust and smoke, insanely crowded streets, and is an incessant visual and aural assault on the senses. The haphazard clustering of neon signs is as visually noisy as the painfully loud techno music shrieking out of newly-opened bakeries and clothing stores at near-unbelievable decibel levels, as pairs of scantily-clad girls feign pleasure while wildly dancing and sweating to win the attention of passersby. The dizzyingly dense concentration of people in areas such as Myeongdong was positively frightening to me the first time I went, as it was when I found myself in the Samseong subway stop on Christmas Eve, when I had to suppress the urge to panic because I feared there might no be enough room on the platform for all the people. Nearly getting run over by motorcycle delivery men upon getting off of fast-moving buses that open the doors well before stopping, or being pushed brusquely aside by an ajumma who will stop at nothing to get that taxi before you do – these are the things that might make Seoul hard to swallow to the newcomer, but to the true Seoulite who can appreciate the city in a comparative perspective, actually defines the dynamic and lively character of this place. Like that quirky aunt who irritates but one can't help but love for all her idiosyncrasies, Seoul can – with a little mental effort – become quite endearing.
But there are a million reasons to hate this place, and I see many Seoulites scowl their ways to work, curse each other through clenched teeth in rush hour traffic, or shoot irritated looks to one another while being bumped and jostled in the tight confines of subway cars in the morning. To the person who is too busy, stressed, or just plain angry to notice see the forest for the trees, life is Seoul is not much more than a rat race. As a foriegn researcher and photographer who can benefit from being able to earn my way through life more easily while living here, it is a bit easier to see the city for what it is; not only do I have the time to do so, but this is my very project while being here. So, dear reader, you might be skeptical of my view of Seoul as an interesting kind of hell, as anything above being purely hell itself.
This is the perspective that is afforded me by being a foreigner; I have the time, relative financial privelege, and inherent perspective to see things a little differently from the average native Seoulite. And as a photographer, I am already a close observer of my surroundings, a fact that further predisposes me to look at city life with a more positive eye. For now, my work is somewhere between art and reportage. Photo-reportage? In any case, it is what defines my choice to express what I have seen in terms of equal amounts text and images. It is said that "a picture is worth 1,000 words," most often to express the idea that a picture can replace the need for lenghty description, that the need for prose is obviated by the obviousness of the picture.
However, prose has the ability to express thoughts more exactly, since what I am doing is not pure "art," and not something I want to leave to interpretation or semantic ambiguity. In this way, the images presented here are made all the more meaningful by the text that accompanies them. The need to describe does not disappear with my photographs – for me, images and text exists in a mutually meaningful relationship.
So this "photo blog" is more than just that – a collection of mostly photos with a few captions. This is a place where the complex meanings bound up in visual images find their full purchase when they are laid and and – I hope – artfully described.
Such is the purpose of this "photo blog," which I hope to raise to a higher level than most others, both in terms of the written word and the captured image.
