<Here's the second chapter of the book, ready for your perusal and comments. Please offer them liberally! Also, please excuse the few places at the end, marked in red, that have a bit of text to be added. Enjoy, and thanks in advance for your feedback!>
Before beginning an even deeper exploration of Seoul in photographic terms, it would be helpful to explain why Seoul is such a good environment for "street photography," as well as define that aesthetic and the genre itself. As I will explore in more detail below, many Koreans are not so familiar with this form of documentation-as-art, so a definition of terms would be helpful. But I will do this not by giving a dry explanation and history of the genre before then moving on to talk about Korea, but rather approach the issue as I did myself, as a photographer already shooting in Korea, largely ignorant of the historical context in which I had been shooting. So I had already started shooting in Korea when I began to be much more curious about the other photographers – either Korean or not – who had tread a path before me with a camera on the streets here.
LEARNING TO SEE
It hasn't been long that I've considered myself a real, working photographer. Although I'd been working in 35mm since I was in the seventh grade, when my dad bought me my first SLR camera, it hadn't been until relatively recently that I'd had a compelling subject. Even when I spent my first two years in Korea from 1994-1996, living in the relative paradise of Cheju Island, I never got past the point of taking really well-exposed snapshots. Even given the bizarre experiences that typified my life as a Korean-speaking foreigner, I never used my camera to document anything significant. But after returning to the States, I would get photographic religion, and I wouldn't make the same mistake again.
Yet my cameras still remained in their bags for a few years while I was a good graduate student preparing for my master's exams, teaching, and generally being swamped with more than enough to distract me. It wasn't until I had begun getting closer to returning to Korea that I came into a project in which I planned to shoot a documentary on the Korean education system as part of my dissertation research. My partner in the project, a friend from Brown and a professional film editor, told me that if I was to be the main videographer, that for the sake of proposals, I needed to show that I could tell a story with a camera.
Me? The photographer? Well, of course I could tell a story with a camera. But then, I realized that I indeed had never actually done so. I knew how to make pretty pictures, but had never told a story. So I took the challenge seriously and decided to go out and find a story.
I didn't have to travel far. My best friend was involved in a Korean culture and traditional drumming group called the Korean Youth Cultural Center (KYCC), which happened to be one of two groups in the United States considered to be absolutely the best outside of Korea. Actually, that group was interesting to me not just photographically, but intellectually as well. Here was a group of people literally "performing" their ethnicity – the symbolic meaning of traditional drumming (pungmul) took on a slightly different meaning for this group of Korean Americans, who I saw as participating in the group to define a Korean "space" for themselves, spiritually as well as physically. Since I was already friends with several members and was a familiar face to all, I decided to start documenting their preparation for their performance in the 2001 "Chinese New Year's Parade," a famous procession that takes place every lunar new year on Market Street, in the middle of downtown San Francisco.
The title of the work ended up being "Performing Korea" and was a major turning point for me calling myself a real "photographer." After nearly 100 rolls of film and weeks of relentless shooting, I had finally produced a body of work. The photo essay, which I published for KYCC on the web, was largely unedited, but had given me the raw experience I need to assert my authority as a photographer, as well as to tell the story of people, the events that motivated them, as well as capture their emotions, all in still images. It started with the portraits of several of the members, followed them through weeks of rehearsals and meetings, all the way through to the final performance. One of the goals of the portraits was to show how different members, from different walks of life – a Berkeley graduate student, a formally-trained Korean dancer, a professional working woman, a Caucasian girl fresh out of college, and a Chinese American linguistics grad student fluent in Korean – come together to define an unmistakably "Korean space" within an American cultural landscape.
The photography was raw, as I had never done portraits, was inexperienced working in black-and-white, and the different types of negative films – black-and-white Tri-X 100 and 400, Tmax 100, 400, and 3200, Ilford X-Pan 125, and then the color negative films Kodak Supra 400 and 800, as well as Fuji NPH 400 and 800 – were confusing to work with. (The different qualities and characters of the films I used are obvious in these first portrait picture I took.) But I developed favorites, started developing a style, and continued the task of shooting the people and their common story.
The shooting was eclectic, marked by technical problems, and marred by an old-fashioned flash that tended to overexpose my subjects. But I felt good about the composition, the moments captured, as well the flow of the story itself. The final product still felt somewhat raw, but left me fairly satisfied, considering it was my first major work.
So as my graduate career moved forward, I passed my qualifying exams, and I began preparing for my move to Korea, as I considered doing serious photo work during my stay in Korea, I still felt the need for some kind of more formal photographic preparation. I was lucky to find a class in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism on documentary photojournalism, to which I had to prepare a portfolio of work (luckily I had my KYCC experience) and apply to a class reserved for only 15 people, I was lucky enough to gain admission. There were only 15 students and I was the only non-journalist in the room. It also turned out to be something closer to a master class, with the well-known photographer and professor Ken Light coordinating visits from other world-famous photodocumentarians, including Susan Meiselas and Sebastio Selgaldo. What I gained from the experiences from my fellow students, several of whom had been working photo and print journalists before entering school again, were invaluable; along with the guidance from some of the visiting photographers, who gave advice and commented on the photo essays we had been preparing for the class, this experience was a priceless one for me. When that semester ended, I had completed my first focused photo story, which I did on the growing Koreatown near downtown Oakland, entitled "Korean Spaces."
<GET PERMISSION TO USE CAROLINE PHOTO>
This work had been more difficult, as I had needed to gain access to places that generally did not welcome photographers, and also photograph people I didn't already know. This had given me a new kind of confidence and additional photographic authority, for one of the hardest things to do is shoot in a somewhat unfriendly environment and take picture of strangers. Additionally, I had to edit the work down to around a dozen total pictures, so editing also became a serious task for me. Combined with the fact that I had also been required to prepare an exhibit as part of the final grade – the first time I would have formally shown my work – I had gained all the basic skills and experiences to undertake a complete project in when I touched down in Korea.
So I hit the Korean street running in August of 2002. But 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. To be honest, much of the “documentary” work there was and is 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.
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.
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.
Kim Ki Chan <Look Up Title>
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.” A professional takes the same or similar shots again, again, and again. 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 last week, 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.
Korea was literally the poorest country in the world in 1953, 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. Even now, a new apartment complex has just been completed, 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 shares 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.
Kim Ki Chan <To Be Identified>
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.
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.” Looking at Kim's work and choice of subjects, then at my own, I can’t help but agree.
Kim Ki Chan, 1975.
Garry Winogrand, 1961.
Michael Hurt, 2003.
KOREAN MEMORIES OF HELL
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, 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.
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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; if I thought all the way back to the foundations of the genre, I could easily throw out the names of "Weegee," Walker Evans, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson. I am not making this inherent comparison to simply say the Korea needs to create more street photographers in order to simply copy the West because the West is essentially worth following. What I am wondering is, given the fact that most other genres of photography and even other forms of art tend to be practiced to about the same extent in Korea as in western countries, especially America – why are the genres of street and documentary photography about Korea so relatively non-existent here, at least as something that is not merely the side hobby of accepted commercial photographers? Where are Korea's photo documentarians?
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 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 Eun Sik
But there is something essentially different about these pictures, taken by Korean photographers, who were trying to document everyday life for the sake of doing so, from those taken by the westerners described above. The images 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.
But 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.
Seoul, 1965-67.
Nam Sang Joon
"Curiosity."
Aeogae, Seoul, 1960.
Son Gyu Mun
"Street Show Market"
Namdaemun, Seoul, 1967.
Lee Hyeong Rok
Shin Su, Seoul, 1957.
Jeong Beom Tae
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. Such was the case with a recent photo exhibit that
<TO BE ADDED – incident about cancelled photo exhibit from WWII>
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 arent' 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:
<BLOCK QUOTE>
"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."
<BLOCK QUOTE>
I instantly thought to myself, upon reading those words, "Why didn't you 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:
<BLOCK QUOTE>
"...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.]"
<BLOCK QUOTE>
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.
The tendency, described above, to avoid depicting "negative" subjects, even during what is arguably one of the most important historical moments for this country since the Korean War, is not only a disservice to Korea's history, but is a crucially dangerous line of thinking. This is the exact same line of thinking that has robbed everyday Korean citizens of their own history as recorded and presented in the canceled exhibit mentioned above. This is the kind of thinking that truly has the potential to distort history. The only real loser here is Korea and her people; this view is short-sighted; no matter how much one might disagree with me at this moment, there is almost nothing that can convince me that Korea 100 years from now won't regret the lack of real photographic work of significant depth covering the important and admittedly painful IMF period.
To the extent that I think the scale of Korean thinking is quite short-sighted, I ask anyone to count the number of photo books published on the 2002 World Cup – the pictures are predictably similar, superficial, and mostly quite clichéd. How many pictures of huddled, red-colored fans staring up expectantly at a off-camera television monitors do we really need to see? Or pictures of people jumping for joy, or hugging, or alternatively, shedding a tear over a game lost? And given the amount of not only incessant press coverage on the subject, but also the millions of amateur photographers who also covered World Cup Korea to death – finding stacks of books about this overcovered subject but not a single one about the IMF period is something more than a little disappointing. It's a shame.
I'm not saying that I don't understand why people want to look at pretty World Cup pictures. But the reasoning is the same as why we like to look at our picture albums that are replete with images of good times, fun events, and important milestones in our lives. They're important in the short term, but these are not the pictures that span centuries with universal meaning. These pictures generally have meaning only to us, and the further away from "us" the picture go, the less the important the pictures become. No matter how much a picture of a moment in our family's life is important to us, to an outsider, the picture is meaningless. In the end, 2002 World Cup moments will be of importance to Koreans only – there's nothing wrong with that. But in terms of those moments when good photographers should rise up and take their place in the nation's history, the World Cup won't produce those pictures. The IMF period did. It had the gravity of the historical, and it was woefully not only undercovered, but actively ignored by many. For this, in the decades to come, I think Korea will quite regret.
But back to Jeon's book. 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." 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?
This is exactly why an insider's look at one's own society can often be superficial and uninteresting, while also avoiding key issues that are actually most important to the society at the moment. Moreover, Koreans, just like westerners, share the "anthropological eye" in documentary phtography that says it's OK to travel to poor countries and cover AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, child prostitution in Thailand, drug addicts in South Asia - I have seen many photo books and exhibits about these subjects. But as soon as one takes pictures of poor people in a Korean slum – committing the ubiquitous crime of helping to create a "negative image" of the country – photographers are readily and actively castigated.
The reaction to MBC's coverage of Dr. Hwang on that network's show, PD Notebook, is typical of exactly this kind of reaction. The corresponding show in the US would be 60 Minutes or Nightline, both shows that regularly deliver hard-hitting and often depressing bad news. Indeed, there were some ethical lines crossed in PD Notebook's coverage, but the clear feeling I got from observing everyday Koreans' reaction to this coverage of Dr. Hwang was one of shock and disbelief based on the thought, "How dare they question Dr. Hwang like this?" At the time, there was little thought of, "What if they are right?" Given the fact that the producers of the show received death threats and had to hide their families, I don't subscribe to the assertion that people were angry about MBC's potential breaches of journalistic ethics, which had been practiced for years without demands for takeing the show off the airwaves. What is obvious is that there are still sacred cows in Korea, and PD Notebook had just slain one – in clear and public view.
KOREA AS HEAVEN
For a lot of reasons, Seoul is actually a photographic heaven. This is the fact that I wish more photographers – Korean and not –would see. 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.
One can stand on 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.
"Waiting"
Shinchon, 2003.
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 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.
"Intimate Strangers"
Seoul subway, 2002
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"Ajummas at Rest"
Seoul subway, 2003.
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"Myeongdong Itinerant"
Myeongdong, 2003.
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"Sticker Frenzy"
Chungmuro, 2002.
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"Cool Girls"
Hongdae, 2004.
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.
