Scribblings of the Metropolitician

A Photo of Korea That Some Might Find Acceptable

Was searching the web for news I could use, when I came across this on the NASA Earth Observatory web site:

Kwangju (or Gwangju) Metropolitan City is the fifth largest urban area in South Korea. With a population of 1.4 million people, it is a major economic and cultural center for the southern portion of the country. The city is located in a geographic basin with high mountains to the east—the mountain of Mudeungsan has a peak elevation of 1,140 meters (3,740 feet)—and more open plains to the west.

The most notable feature in this astronaut photograph is an interesting blue cast to the urbanized regions. Digital astronaut photographs capture the same red, green, and blue wavelengths of reflected light that human eyes are sensitive to (known as a “true-color” image), and urban areas typically appear in tones of grey in such images. The distinctive blue-grey color of the Kwangju metropolitan area is the result of numerous blue rooftops, present on both small residential buildings (not visible at the image resolution) and large industrial buildings such as those located at image center and image right. High-resolution imagery of the rooftops (not shown) suggests that the blue color is the result of painting rather than an intrinsic characteristic of the building material.

Very interesting kind of "street photography" going on, showing some distinctive features of Korea, even from space. Perhaps that will be the only place one can safely take pictures in Korea outside of a studio without a written model release and contract, if certain people had their way with things.

Because after all, it's professional photographers – not hot-headed netizens posting images to the Internet with the expressed intent of causing harm – that have been on the minds of everyday Koreans, right?

Anyway, it's interesting that the blue-paint pattern of Korean rooftops can be seen all the way from space. Who knew? Fascinating stuff.

On Respect for Photographic Subjects

This comes from a real question posed by David, related to photos and recordings' relation to laws and ethics. I'm glad to see a real conversation come from my indulgence of the urge to get in the mud. The original comment:

Hi...

Question: In which of these cases is it ok to record another's voice, without them knowing?
-in a conversation with them?
-when they're conversing with someone else?
-when they're giving a lecture in a school?
-when they're giving a public performance?

I ask because I think this has some relevance to this debate on street photography/personal rights.

--------------

Again, keeping it real...

It depends on the content and the purpose for recording it. As with anything, there are no absolutes. Even in the law, such things are often tricky, and the judgements and rationales difficult to navigate. That's why the law requires people to interpret it according to circumstances.

But for the creator of such content, the guidelines of content and purpose, whether it be photography or my podcasting.

So, if an undergraduate recorded their biochemistry lecture, who cares? It's not sensitive material. If they recorded it on a site that resold the content and charged for access, then suddenly, it becomes sensitive, because the professor's purpose for giving the lecture was not to have it sold, without their permission, for commercial purposes.

Same with photography – you can't take a picture of someone eating ice cream and sell it to Baskin-Robbins; if the people in the picture sue, unless they have signed contracts and model releases, BR's goose is cooked.

Taking a recording without someone's permission is technically illegal (I believe), but who cares if I record the people at the next table's conversation and keep it in my personal archives? If I use it on a radio show and somehow the people in the recording find out, I can get in real trouble.

That's why Linda Tripp's recordings were so morally screwed up and legally problematic – it's sensitive material (i.e. "I blew the President") and how the material was gathered (being recorded without permission) is at issue.

If you are a photojournalist (or anyone else, but most everyday people don't walk around taking pictures of sensitive things), if you take pictures, you have to know that you might be subpoenaed for the materials, even if you don't want to hand them over. Or if you're working in a poor country run by a repressive regime, it doesn't matter what your intent is if you can't secure your own person; that's something to think about.

And people complain about street photography here (apparently), but I think the issues aren't much different from audio (or video) recordings: it's about the content and the intended use. And I think that my podcast #16 ("December in Myeongdong") is actually quite similar to my street photography in that it's random snippets of real Seoul (one in pictures, one in snippets of conversation and sound as I walk down the street), with no coherent theme or story.

And I think the liklihood of someone getting hurt from the pictures about the same as the audio – sure, I might be recording the passersby saying ("...and yeah, when Mary Ann Kim slept with John Doe Lee after the Samsung office party in Dogok-dong..."), but it's probably not going to happen.

Same with the pictures – yes, a person might be momemtarily surprised to find that – out of 10 million people living in Seoul, their picture of them carrying flowers was in a photo book or some photographer's site, but in the end, it's not content that's going to affect them materially in any way.

I think a lot of this paranoia comes from an overreaction to the early days of the Korean internet, mostly. Yeah, we needed a few horrible examples from which to learn, but in the age of "UCC" and people literally taking off their clothes and dancing in pink pajamas for a shot at the big time, while the nation "ho-hums" and moves on to the next distraction of the week, there's not going to be much that will gather the interest of the nation. Even the couple near-naked dancing on the car in the 2006 World Cup (a Korean girl with a white guy – oh, the horror!) was kind of like, "Well, umm...they're kinda lame. She's stupid, but oh, well...") She wasn't leaving school and changing her home address because of it.

Anyway, it's about the content and the purpose of it being recorded. I've gotten email asking "What if I recorded you in a compromising position and put it on the Internet?! Huh, huh?!" Well, you'd be a) recording me in a compromising position on PURPOSE, so the content itself is questionable, and b) you'd be doing it to hurt me. Pretty much the opposite of what I do.

If I were to publish a picture of say, a drunk salaryman vomiting, my goal wouldn't be to destroy his life to prove a point, nor does his individual identity matter to me. In fact, I'd probably choose a shot in which he was blurry, to protect his anonymity, but the fact that it was a salaryman in a suit vomiting would be clear.

A good and similar example is above, where I chose one of the artistically worst out of several shots, since the faces were clearly visible in others, but I chose to publish the one in which the least faces were shown (a friend is shown there, but it's small, blurry, and you're likely not going to lose your job or wife over having been there to help an unidentified drunk friend), especially the one of the person in question. And I lucked out because you got some depth to the picture with the alley, which also helped contextualize it. But there were other shots that showed more – I still erred on the side of politeness and caution, since I think about the possible harm that might come to subjects, although I think that highly unlikely.

So I conveyed the point – such scenes are as much a part of night life in Korea as any kids playing in the park wearing hanboks on Chusok, stuff that I am completely unconcerned with – without compromising a subject. And frankly, such scenes are so common, and/or something that is such a part of anyone's individual experience, that having been drunk like this is still not going to get anyone fired. Frankly, such an eventuality ("public drunkenness", which is an actual crime in the US, but not in Korea) would likely be much more problematic in America than in Korea.

And what anyone thinks about what this says about "Korea" – I don't work for the Korean National Tourism Organization, nor some imagined Society to Give Korea a Bad Name in the International Community (SGKBNIC); I'm just a street photographer and I shoot what I see, the rhythms of everyday life. And if you actually walk around any Korean city on any given night of the week, you will see drunk men in suits staggering about, women consoling their suddenly sad (and very drunk) friend, and vomit on the sidewalk in the morning anywhere in Chongno is probably about as common as doggy doo on the sidewalk back in the US.

Is it "good?" Is it "bad?" Well, if you're the kind of person who thinks that shooting a man carrying flowers is "anti-Korean" – well, you're already pretty paranoid, and a lost cause for me, anyway.

It's like my favorite prostitution picture, in which it having been shot on 1600-speed, extremely grainy color film prevents any real detail from being shown, combined with the fact that the subject's face is too small to make out any distinct features, what with the obvious wig/hair salon special she's wearing, or the standard outfitting of false eyelashes and a pancake of makeup. I dare even her best friend to try and recognize her in person, let alone through the wide-angle lens of a photographer driving his car with one hand, nervously pointing his camera through a tinted-glass window.

You can make out enough detail to see her expression, but not actively identify her; she could be anyone. Even if the woman in question recognized herself, she'd have a tough time even proving it was here, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in a court of law to even sue me in the first place. That's why this is the perfect picture.

For all those who disagree, and think my intentions somehow evil, let me just say that if I could show you the one picture I can never show in my defense, this particular argument would be over. Done. It's a high-resolution digital shot of a woman in a similar position, but it's razor-clear, and chock full of detail and character.

Personally, I think mine to be technically much better and more honest than the one below that was published in the SF Chronicle (with no concern being given to Korean law, in terms of the subject, whose face is clearly shown – the only reason I republish it here is because it's been linked to and passed around the 'net to no end, with even progressive American NGO's linking to it, who never don't consider this a problem because hey, it's not my society, right? – at least I can make a good point with it, since the cat's out of the bag); you'll never know, because you'll never see that picture. I'll never publish it.

Just for the record, my picture shows what is more typical in these areas after anti-prostitution law – girls sitting around between customers, typically knitting (a fad these days), chatting, or taking a smoke; my shot was of a woman singing along to a pop tune on the radio, and was full of rich details, such as a "protect youth from violence" poster from a government campaign, beauty supplies, clothes in the back, stuffed animals, etc. And that was gained by getting my ass out of the car, walking by and breathing the same air as my subjects, risking getting caught by the thugs in the area, and not pulling the sneaky move of shooting out of a car window, catching them as they noticed the camera and then driving away.

What I don't like about the picture is that the apparent look of disdain and sneer on the face of the women in the picture comes from realizing that they're being photographed more than from the apparent plight in which the Chronicle obviously has a vested interest in proving these women are in.

And before you good feminists get all up in arms because you think I am saying that these women aren't in some plight, I'll just say that no matter what I think about the institution, when I'm photographing, I take the mission of capturing what I find dead serious. When I was nervously walking through Yongsan when I got the pictures I was describing earlier, I wasn't looking for a particular booth, or a kind of girl, or look; I was just walking, snapping, walking, snapping, with my remote plunger in my pocket going off at every stall (if I actually had the camera to my eye, or even my hand on the shutter, I would have been surely stopped by the watchers in the area, who are there to protect the girls, their business, and their interests – and that doesn't include media people taking pictures); when I came back to my monitor at home is when I found gold.

And there's gold there, in the sense of a couple pictures that shed much more life, even in single shots, and give the women in the windows much more complexity than the pictures that appeared in the Chronicle. And I wonder why, if the Chronicle respected their subject enough to blur the picture and omit the face of one of their main informants, they were OK with plastering the faces of these Korean prostitutes in Korea all over the Internet?

In American terms anyway, what they did was legal. The girls were in a public place. And realistically, they're not going to be sued internationally according to Korean laws for shooting a hooker. Photographically, though, I thought the Chronicle's moves pretty disrespectful of the subjects in Korea, highlighted by how extra-sensitive they were being to the main subjects – who also had vested interests in proving they were being trafficked and getting on the fast track to a green card.

Say what you want about me poking the sacred cow of the trafficking issue in the ass, but that's something that bothered me about the whole "exposé for the sake of these poor women" that was worked by the Chronicle. Why is it that they seem to show more care to the women in the US than to the women they came to photograph in Korea? Aren't the future prospect of the passionately-described "Youmi" of the feature as important as the unnamed Korean hookers whose faces are shown without a moment's hesitation across the Internet?

That's why I get so steamed about people calling me or my photography or this site "anti-Korean" or that I disrespect my subjects; if you knew the pictures I have held back on (and continue to), even when foreign photographers are showing up to cover and shoot topical issues about which I've got better material and access on hand down – and could simply push the "publish" button on my blog to easily prove it...I don't.

And that's out of respect for my subjects, respect for Korean law, and for wanting to continue to function here as a photographer in Korea. As a no-name photographer, it was tempting to pull out all my best stuff and jump on the bandwagon – how easy would that have been? To make a mega-post about prostitution and populate it with those money pictures I'd never shown before? Let me tell you – fucking easy.

I'm not trying to make myself out to be some saint – I'm just trying to tell the haters: if only you knew the choices I make when editing, you'd know that if this photographer/blogger/podcaster actually "hated" Korea – wow.

But I make virtual promises with my subjects to basically not fuck them, nor step over ethical lines. Hence, no matter how much I rant and rage about the education system here, I keep my camera off when it comes to the kids I teach. Even when I come to hate certain of the institutions who quite literally fucked me. Because one thing (my having been screwed) has nothing to do with the other (my kids and the implied assumption that, as a teacher, my kids' privacy comes first, my being a photographer is secondary).

Anyway – what I have described above is just one example of how content and intent, as well as affective commitment to the place you're at, where you call home right now, affects the artistic and ethical choices you make.

And for those who think this results in being "anti-Korean" or "unethical" or whatnot – I just have to say that you are definitely either overly paranoid and nationalist, or you have no direct experience with having produced and published anything yourself. And if you combine the two, without asking the intelligent kind of questions that David did, which allowed me to formulate a clear answer – that you have to think about content and intent, along with a respect for the subjects while balancing the desire to express something in general, and that there are no black-and-white – then it's difficult to say anything particularly useful.

Why Wrestling With Blog Trolls Is Like Conversing With Eliza

Who's this Eliza? Go speak with her now.

I know, I shouldn't do it. But Typepad doesn't have a nice subscriber system like Wordpress, so these trolls keep showing up. And they're so stoopid that I can't resist. Like chocolates. I keep banning them, but if they're right there, I just...wanna...doh!

Tell 'Em To Kiss Your Ass, Mr. Ebert

Roger Ebert is sick, fighting cancer. But I can't believe that people are telling him to stay inside, because it might attract gossip, or somehow be harmful to him. So? He's gonna be at his next film festival, anyway.

And more power to him. From his own column in The Chicago Sun-Times:

My Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival opens Wednesday night at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and Chaz and I will be in attendance.

This year I won’t be speaking, however, as I await another surgery.

I have received a lot of advice that I should not attend the festival. I’m told that paparazzi will take unflattering pictures, people will be unkind, etc.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. As a journalist I can take it as well as dish it out.

He wryly jokes that:

I ain’t a pretty boy no more. (Not that I ever was. The original appeal of “Siskel & Ebert” was that we didn’t look like we belonged on TV.)

I've often disagreed with his reviews, often whole-heartedly agreed, but I've always respected his sticking to his guns, letting loose as he sees fit, not giving in to popular opinion. That's the Ebert I remember going at it with Siskel when I was a kid.

And I'm glad he continues to stick to his guns, while keeping that biting sense of humor. Roger Ebert, 화이팅!

As I Been Saying!

It's funny how dyed-in-the-wool lefty "liberals" (I hate these terms) like myself are showing up these days wrapping themselves in the American flag. I did it myself in my post "America, the Theoretically Beautiful, as Written by a True 'Conservative'", in which I said:

So when I look at the "Patriot Act" or what's worse – the proposed "Patriot II" bill – it makes me realize how far down the slope we've started. Just like the Federalists in the 1790's, when power-crazed John Adams pushed through the Alien and Sedition acts to crush his political opposition (which later coalesced politically into the Jeffersonian Republicans and the first real political parties) in the name of war and rumors of war, the Bush administration has decided that it is worth sacrificing our way of life – the basic protections of individual rights from the prying interests of the state, as promised to the Anti-Federalists as condition for them signing off on the Constitution in the first place – for the sake of countering the phantom menace of "terrorists."

I agree – we are dealing with bad people. They did bad things to us and others in the world. But this kind of political reaction has many precedents in history – including especially our own – and the menace we faced has usually not in actuality posed a threat commensurate with our overreaction.

Such were the words of one self-described "true patriot," writing with concern about the erosion of our most basic civil liberties as an American, not as a mere "Democrat" or "Republican", writing in from overseas as I watch the spirit and the letter of the Constitution increasingly gutted.

And in that piece, I lamented that the so-called "conservatives" and "patriots" are so busy being petty and political around Bush and perceived cultural threat of gay rights, abortion, or teaching scientific theories such as evolution in science classes, that doing everything short of actually taking a scissors to the original, yellowed text of the Constitution itself is OK. Well, as long as he's accomplishing our direct and fleeting political goals, right?

But I'm a purist. I hesitate and wince when people talk about canceling the 2nd Amendment in response to the Cho Seung-hui incident; and Canadians own guns like a mofo and they're not shooting each other left and right, a point most famously pointed out by none other than Michael Moore. I think it would be legitimate to define handguns as outside the reasonable definition of "arms" – hand grenades and bazookas are not legal, after all; there's gotta be a line drawn somewhere, right? Maybe it should include handguns? It's a legitimate question.

Yet, I don't like slippery slopes. And I don't like it when people mess with any of the original ten Amendments, affectionately known as "The Bill of Rights."

Apparently, Naomi Wolf, whose "liberal" credentials aren't in dispute, is becoming my kinda brand o' "true conservative." She writes in The Guardian in her piece "Fascist America, Ten Easy Steps", and while the title is bombastic, the contents are far more compellingly chilling. An excerpt:

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal "outer space") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or "criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

But that's just being paranoid, right? The word "fascism" applied to America? That's a bridge too far! Such are the dangers posed by that very peculiar brand of American exceptionalism, which runs throughout American thinking and identity, which postulates that the historical processes that apply to the rest of the world don't apply to us.

God, I hope they're right, but I don't feel like I can just stick my face in the sand as the signs tell me that notions of exceptionalism might not save us:

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".

"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.

"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution."

"That'll do it," the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

The fact is, if I were right now asserting my Constitutionally-protected right to sign up for an anti-war group, or walk in a peace march, or write inflammatory words on a blog, I could end up on the "no-fly list" and I would have no legal recourse to find out who put me there, why, nor have a way to get off.

Is this paranoia, as people on the right tend to write this off as?

What's surprising to me is that the self-described conservatives should be starting to be my "strange bedfellows," but are increasingly on the other side of the fence, happy that "national security", gay rights, and abortions as swing issues are keeping them nice and happy.

"Showers and Flowers"

Spring is really upon us, as people have been seen carrying flowers more these days, perhaps to spruce up the cubicle, freshen up the home decor, or just give to a loved one on a date.

I just loved the contrasts posed by the subject's tough guy swagger, cigarette in the teeth, and a bouquet of flowers carefully cradled in his hands. One could only wonder whether he was coming or going with them.

In the picture below, I simply like the reads and pinks against the other random colors in the background, as well as the slight motion blur I got as I tracked the woman walking across my field of view.

All of it made me feel like spring.

Get on the Ball!

Think you're "on the ball"? Or your students? Check this out:

Several elementary school classrooms across the country [the US] have replaced their hard plastic chairs with bouncy ball seating. In my opinion, the idea is absolutely genius. I wish I got to sit on a ball in school…

Mrs. Raabe’s fifth-grade class in Charlotte, North Carolina recently embraced ergonomic innovation in an attempt to increase attention spans and facilitate good posture. The classroom is now a sea of motion in which children bob and weave, sway and bounce their way through lessons perched atop brightly colored fitness balls. The old metal-and-plastic chairs stand in lonely stacks at the front and back of the classroom.

In a letter the students sent to school administrators, the children outlined six compelling reasons they should sit on balls instead of chairs.

“We will be able to wiggle in our seats so we will not feel the need to get up and move around as much and miss parts of lessons,” they wrote. “The balls will help our posture. The balls will help our handwriting because our feet will be on the floor, and we will be sitting up straight.”

That's awesome. From "Ten Reasons to Use an Exercise Ball as Your Chair":

1. Forces proper spine alignment. Because an exercise ball is not stable, your body needs to try to balance itself on it. The perfect spinal posture is coincidently the easiest to balance with. Thus, your body will automatically try to align itself into the proper posture. This helps improve your spinal health, and decrease back pains.

2. Causes you to frequently change positions. An exercise ball causes to you to change your position often to balance. For example, if you turn 45 degrees to face the phone, your body will assume a new position. This helps reduce damage caused by prolonged sitting in the same position.

3. Fitness is at your fingertips. Another great thing about using this alternative to a chair, is that you can do stretches or mini-workouts whenever you want, without getting up. If you’ve ever stuck waiting for a minute or two, you can make productive use of that time with a quick workout or stretch. Because it’s much more convenient, you will probably do it more, thus resulting in better health.

4. Improve your balance. This one is very understandable. Sitting on an unstable surface all day will improve your sense of balance, as well as the reactions of your muscles. The result? An overall better balance, that can be observed out of the office.

5. Get that 6-pack you’ve been wanting. Your body primarily uses your core (abdominal) muscles to help compensate for changes in balance. Thus, your essentially getting a low-key abdominal workout. This may not sound like a lot, but consider the amount of time you spend on your computer at the office, or at home. Those hours can build up, and result in a strengthening of ab muscles.

6. Improves your circulation. Using an exercise ball will keep the blood flowing to all parts of your body, throughout the day. A desk chair on the other hand, reduces circulation to some parts of the body after prolonged use.

7. You’ll feel more energetic. It has been proven that staying in one position, will make you more tired, while moving around and being active with give you more energy. With an exercise ball as a chair, you will feel much more energized after you finish your work.

8. Burn up to 350 calories per day. More movement during the day = more calories burnt. Burning 350 calories per day = losing one pound of fat every 10 days. You may not burn quite 350, but nonetheless, it will help you stay fit.

9. Really cheap. Specialized exercise balls designed for sitting usage can range from $15 to $80. Much cheaper than buying an ergonomic chair, which can range anywhere from $100 to $400 and up.

10. C’mon, its fun! Who doesn’t like the idea of bouncing around on an exercise ball all day. Exercise balls are an exciting alternative to chairs, and may just give that spark of fun to your day.

Don't believe? Read some other articles here and here to see what some experts are saying, and generally the results are quite positive.

I'm really raring to try it and report back the results. Now, the next question is where I can find exercise balls in Korea to buy. Anyone care to join in this experiment, and if it proves useful, go "balls to the walls" with me?

And clearly, this may give new meaning and purpose to commenter "iheartblueballs" over at the Marmot. It may very well turn out that soon, we may all be hearting blue balls, too.

Speak On It, Girl!

A commenter named Susan waxes eloquent a lot better than I did when I first started this line of inquiry. If Korean men feel slighted, I do apologize, as it's not my intent to vilify Korean men. However, I do think it's time to use this incident to look closer at a lot of the things in our Korean families and communities that certainly define overwhelming patterns of thought, attitudes, and behavior.

In a way, I'm past the specifics of any attempts to size up and reverse-psychoanalyze Cho. But to say he wasn't Korean or influenced by anything Korean at all is just as thick-headed and obstinate as saying he necessarily was, in light of the lack of evidence and the fact that we'll likely never know.

I know my initial reaction to all this was smug and snarky, but my overall intentions, if you really look at my subsequent posts, as I continued to mull over it while learning more and more about this incident as it progressed along with the rest of the world, should be clearer than they were two days ago. My thoughts about it are clearer as well.

Susan's reasonable yet heartfelt, damning but deft, and just plain nail-on-the-head expressions of pain, frustration, and hope as a person from the inside should be sincerely considered, and not just as more fodder for nit-picky, lickity-split flames. Even if you don't agree, please try to listen to one another.

Thanks.

"First Spring Shower"

A young man helps shield a companion against a sudden and chilly March evening shower, on a rare occasion when many Seoulites were caught off guard and without umbrellas.

OK, that's the picture and caption.

But as a photographer, one is often caught in a maddeningly tough set of choices before deciding what to "print." In the age of Photoshop and the Internet, this choice is lessened, since one can always put up the alternates, publish the b-roll, and add value to the product with "special features."

Second guessing oneself, in the digital age, is actually "value-added content." Or something like that. And I'm going to continue with the trend. I chose the above shot as my "official" choice, but since this is a blog, I'm going to give ya'll some "special features" and a "director's commentary." I won't torture you with too many "scenes from the cutting room floor," but one alternative is required to do the trick of giving you more to chew on.

The above picture is clearly the better choice photographically. I took about 20 pictures of this couple, and was standing really right on them, as this was taken with a 20mm lens (effective lens length with the EOS 350's digital enlargement effect is about 32mm) and the help of a friend who gave me an excuse and a reason to be standing all up on this pair at a bus stop.

To my direct right stood my friend, while I shot with my left hand, using the vertical shutter button, while I was "nonchalantly" cradling the camera in my arm. Takes some practice to master, and having a digital to get cover shots keeps from breaking your budget, but a good trick. You also have to have practiced quite a bit to see how much others generally pick up the sound of the shutter. On a street like that, though, passing busses and motorbikes offer good sonic cover.

The problem with the photo above is that it leaves the photographer open to Korean "right to one's image" laws. Now, taking their picture isn't illegal, contrary to popular opinion these days. [Read my post "Korean Photo Paranoia, 초상권, and Legal Inexactitude"] for all you never wanted to know about Korean photo law.] Nor is publishing their picture, technically, illegal. However, if the publishing of their picture results in demonstrable, concrete harm, I can be in trouble in civil court, as they can be awarded damages that stem directly from my picture, which I'd have to pay out of pocket.

What damages? Oh, like if that woman, in perhaps not being his girlfriend nor being described as such, happens to piss off his girlfriend, who then breaks off their engagement and causes him to sink into a well of depression, which in turn causes him to lose his job and begin living a life of misery.

In Korean law, that can be my fault. In American and most other democratic countries (with the major and notable exception of France, which has killed its own tradition of street photography by making it actually illegal to publish any picture without expressed, written permission), people standing in a public place have no explicit rights over how the image is used, unless, of course, you use their image commercially or misrepresent what is happening in the picture, or you portray them in an excessively "bad light" or what have you. But if your street shot just happens to catch two people together who shouldn't be (according to his wife), then that's his problem, not mine.

As it should be, since the photographer shouldn't be liable for someone else's immoral or illegal (in Korea, adultery is illegal and can carry criminal charges) acts. And realistically, no one is going to be harmed because you took their bad side in the morning, or caught them without makeup (oh, the horror!) No one's going to lose their job because they were caught not looking their best, which in Korea, would involve hours in makeup, a photo studio, and heavy photoshopping. Or simply overexposing to the point of obscuring basic facial features, as they do in the little couple-oriented "Star Shots" photo studios that were all the rage from the late 1990's.

It almost never happens, Korean photographers tell me, and the only place you're really going to get into trouble is if you use their image commercially without their permission, which is, to be blunt, just plain messed up. If I used the picture above to sell my brand of umbrellas – "Don't get caught without a Michael Hurt™ fashion umbrella!" – then they should sue my pants off.

If I use the shot for artistic or news purposes (and the latter is even more protected), then it would be harder to sue. There are other concerns, though, if you are a newspaper reporter, since "John Doe Kim and Bobby Sue Lee work hard to fend off the rain" is much better than talking in generalities and not getting the names of the people in the picture. However, for a real news story, if there were a fire in a seedy motel and two people were seen together who shouldn't have been at 2 PM on a work day, well – tough luck. Chalk it up to an act of God, not the fault of an unethical photographer; after all – who's the one really being unethical here?

Anyway, these are some legal issues to think about in Korea. As for aesthetic ones, in the picture above, there is the fact that both of their faces are shown and their expressions indicate they are waiting for something, most likely a bus, as anyone who has lived in a city anywhere in the world could safely assume.

Compare the above picture with the other candidate, which I've included below. There, their faces are actually not visible, which lets me off the hook in terms of the Korean law in the unlikely event of a lawsuit, but it doesn't convey that additional piece of information about what it is they might be doing. In the picture below, there is this implied sense of intimacy, especially since it's implied that the woman below is smiling, with her expression being lit up and silhouetted by the overexposed street sign (I always shoot in center-weighted metering mode for situations just like this, since the exposure reading is set by what's in the center of the frame, as opposed to averaging the total amount of light in the frame, which is the default in most cameras. If this were a standard point-and-shoot on full automatic, the street sign would probably come out relatively readable and the couple in the foreground unusably dark).

Most of the other pictures were actually devoid of other visual cues indicating why either of them might be holding a bag over their heads. The street is wet, but the fact that it was raining doesn't just jump out at you. So what helped make these two picture the final candidates was the presence of other picture elements that contextualized what the couple was doing. In the picture above, it's obvious as day, since the ajumma passing by has an umbrella; what's more, and what makes the picture even stronger, is that she is seemingly looking over in their direction. So she adds spatial depth, performs an explanatory function, and gives an element of human interaction.

In the picture below, the other man standing off to the left offers some of this, but not as obviously (no umbrella!) and not as strongly (he's smaller and not as obvious).

I know it sounds like a lot of analysis and fretting, but writing it out (or even reading it) requires a lot more effort than the couple of minutes it takes to look at several pictures, compare them, bring them down to a final few (or two), and then deciding between them in the way I've described above.

It may sound like work, but for me, it's fun. And that's why I love being a photographer. And if you think it silly to carry one's camera with you, unsheathed and ready to fire at any time, even in the rain – then let this picture be another testament to that. You wouldn't be looking at these pictures if I wasn't obsessive-compulsive with my camera in my hand.

Gotta love it.

"Laugh Concert"

I'm trying to get to blogging-as-usual, and I thought the best way to do that was through a picture – a happy picture (or two).

A television crew from a show apparently called "Laugh Concert" visits the fashionable Myeongdong shopping district, where eager passersby, feigning reluctance, are "forced" to perform for the camera, in this case, laughing forcefully and hysterically on cue.