Well, kinda. OK, not really. But it's been two weeks since my last post and I think I got some explaining to do. And I thought that now would be a good a time as any.
First off, I'm sure some of you may have been noticing that the audio and video podcasting (Metropoliticking in Seoul and SeoulGlow, respectively) has dropped off quite a bit. And now, this apparent slackiness has hit this blog as well, seeing as how I haven't upped a post in two weeks.
Truth be told, I've been busy. Really. Like, not the got-too-much-shit-to-do-just-forgot-about-you kinda busy that everybody gets, but the kind where my time and efforts have been going somewhere else – the only thing is that you don't know where. And today, I'm gonna tell you; yet, in my signature wordy-as-all-get-out style, I'm not gonna do it anywhere near within the first few paragraphs. Hehe.
And I've been thinking about where this blog started, what's happened along the way, and where it's going. I started out as a photo blog after my photo column was dropped from a certain Seoul Selection newsletter, but I must admit that we were partners who had become estranged. As they say, "It was better for both of us."
Originally an alternative outlet for continuing to get my pictures out, this blog slowly evolved into an outlet for social commentary, since I was in the midst of a whole bunch of heavy thinking and teaching about just those subjects at the time (was teaching a "social problems" course about the US during the normal school year and the same topic about Korea during the summer Korean Studies program at the Hanguk University of Foreign Studies), and had been sitting on a whole body of writing about certain subjects, as well as busy being obsessed with street photography and getting into the meat and fat and into the bone of things with my camera as much as I was able.
In the meantime, I've been called "racist" for broaching the topic of Asian male penis size (get over it already) and white privilege (it exists, hello?), "anti-American" for calling the war in Iraq a farce (duh, it is!) or saying that Bush is a disgrace to his office and to the country (because he deserves to be impeached, yo); I've also been called "anti-Korean" for pointing out perfectly obvious things such as Korean racism (still don't take the subway), the low status of women (still more spots for employment in houses of prostitution than in decent jobs with long-term options), or that the education system is in a state of complete structural failure (as any read of a Korean newspaper would readily make one have to agree).
Lately, after even the most innocuous of pictures of people walking around with flowers and umbrellas get me described as "a bringer of death" and other ludicrous things, I simply stopped having joy in posting pictures here, and after a while, simply got sick of even thinking about posting in a long, reasoned essay form.
Lately, if you've noticed, my content has been pretty "safe" – singular rants that leave little room for debate, brief postings about popular culture happening that only peripherally have to do with Korea, and nostalgic waxing about old bits of movies, videos, and other esoterica from times past.
You might have noticed that my longer posts, which laid out my thinking on a certain subject and were often much more open-ended than in recent days, have pretty much disappeared. It's fatigue – from feeding the trolls, from not wanting to be the same "angry guy", from people continuing to mistake the blog as the only part of what I have to say about Korea (Metropoliticking in Seoul and SeoulGlow are both pretty bullish on Korea, you know).
The way I see it, if I'm gonna put something critical out there, the written form makes the most sense, since criticizing means you're gonna have some explaining to do. The audio medium tends to involved talking to not just myself, but to others, and inevitably tends towards the positive side of things, seeing as how people tend to not give their permission to be attacked in person. And the video medium leans even more strongly in the direction of boosterism, unless you've got the tenacity of Michael Moore and balls of steel.
In all this, my photo work has been going on, but my outlet for publishing it sorely neglected. It didn't help that my publisher broke the contract with my photo book because I couldn't/wouldn't deliver canned-pap-passed-as-photography; but I did keep shooting.
You might have noticed that my interests in photography were really centered on femininity, fetish, and the visual construction of the "woman" on the streets of Korea, and I think I produced some pretty smart stuff when that interest first hit me. Then I got a chance to do a little commercial photography, moved over to digital, and discovered a whole new set of possibilities. And as my documentary street shooting waned, so was my interest in audio, video, and other directions in photo blossoming.
This started strong with SeoulGlow (which isn't dead, but dormant, I assure you), continued with Metropoliticking in Seoul (some surprises coming there, let me tell you), and grew evolved into something altogether new with...the "secret" project I've been working on for more than a year now.
Yes, I've been living a double life, my friends.
As unlikely as all this may sound, I am now successfully indulging a slew of artistic interests, while also trying to focus all my various endeavors in audio, video, blogging, and photo into something that not only will keeps my artistic juices flowing, but might also just pay the bills sometime soon, with a little luck and elbow grease. I am also upping the level of challenging myself, since I am now regularly writing in both English and Korean as well, while taking more useful and challenging pictures than ever.
I am the founder and editor of FeetManSeoul.com, Korea's first and only street fashion magazine, dedicated to documenting the fashion, feel, and fun of the Korean street.
"Feet" is also an F-word that goes in there, but that's more symbolic than literal. Feet symbolize motion, going somewhere, getting out there ("on your feet"), being social (in Korean, knowing one's way around and having many connections is expressed as have "having wide feet"), and also just makes more sense than "FashionManSeoul" or "StreetManSeoul" or "FunManSeoul" or just about anything else like "StreetFashionSeoul" or whatever other names came up. FeetManSeoul just had a peculiar, quirky ring to it that just stuck with me.
To be honest, the two personas are rooted in the same fascination with the street, society, documentation, and trying to be edgy as the Metropolitician is; and I don't see them as contradictory, but complementary, since as a photographer, watching patterns, trends, and inevitably, what people wear is a part of the territory. It was only after my 3rd female friend demanded that I take her shopping because I had a better sense of the trends than she did that I really saw this new calling.
It started out as more of an experiment than anything else, prompted by my switch to the digital camera, which absolutely blew my mind. No film costs? No developing? No more scanning to get film into digital form, anyway? Instantaneous feedback? And higher resolution than film? And for $600 for a digital body? Digital had me at "3600 pixels across."
The experiment? Unleash the male gaze, follow a fetish, photograph the unphotographable. Taking pictures of people had become easy – no longer a challenge. My skills had stagnated. But what about taking a picture of one part of the body? (No snickering.) Can you do that? Can you do it without getting caught? And what skills do you need to pull it off, and pull off well, both technically and artistically? So me (and my gungho girlfriend at the time – yay!) took to the project enthusiastically, and she was my one and only fan when I started the site and simply uploaded attractive pics of..."fashion from the ground up."
Well, OK. But wait. It's not like I had any choice. I didn't want to violate Korean law, nor was I really interested in publishing anything truly pervy – BreastManSeoul or ButtManSeoul wasn't anything I wanted any truck with, obviously, and the original idea for the name was actually inspired by a blog I loved called FATmanseoul, and was sort of an inside joke, since that site was simply about FOOD as fetish – so in sum, this new site was just a campy experiment that was meant to die, as an anonymous blog and with my quirky girlfriend as my #1 fan. And I saw myself getting bored with the project in a few months, tops.
And I did. Summer turned to fall, I had seriously elevated my photo skills to near ninja level, and I was simply getting bored with the idea. But instead of just letting it quietly die (and saving myself from the inevitable ribbing that I am inviting with this post), I started getting dragged into the fashion world.
I did some shooting for a friend's online shopping mall with models recruited from acquaintances, which turned out surprisingly well; I gave a friend a fashion makeover-for-a-day that got her stopped in the streets several times; I was asked to take another female friend shoe-shopping, with the condition she had to buy whatever recommendation I made - she text messaged me when the custom shoes arrived (I demanded they take off the ribbons and change the color), reporting she had gotten over 10 compliments from her coworkers the very first day she wore them. These things didn't seem like coincidences, and I had actually started eyeing copies of Vogue and Cindy the Perky on the newsstands. The writing was on the wall.
Cue interlude, from The 40-Year-Old Virgin: "You wanna know how I know you're gay...?"
Well, I'll just say that if you start hanging out with gaggles of fashionable girls, taking lots of their pictures, and then start showing up at fashion shows and other events filled with even more hot chicks, well...you're either very gay or very not gay – I'll leave that up to you to discuss, my friends.
In any case, I moved from feet to fashion pretty quickly, and had always been tracking trends (even if I hadn't been writing about them), something I found challenging and fun. My candid street shots were, to toot my own horn for a minute, getting pretty darn good, but I was starting to get bored again. Now, I was ready for street portraiture, which, I must say, is pretty doggone hard. An example, one of my most successful:
[Read their surprisingly touching story on FeetManSeoul.com]
Street portraiture? Basically, grab a fashionable person on the street, try to capture their personality, style, as well as the feel of their immediate surroundings, all with mixed flash and natural light (my style: using flash but making it seem like I'm NOT using flash, as in the picture above), and all within the 3-5 minutes or so you'll get before the busy subject starts getting really impatient; and all while thinking about the technical aspects of the shot, while urging a subject to not be embarrassed at all the people staring, instead asking them to be natural so you can capture a sliver of their real personality. And all to a perfect stranger. And all in Korean.
You might say that ain't as hard as it looks; you'd be right – it's harder.
[An attendee of the week-long fashion shows at Seoul Fashion Week]
I'm pretty much using all my skills developed in Korea thus far now: blogging, online publishing, documentary and street photography, audio and video production, fiddling around in CSS and PHP to make a Wordpress blog go, improving my Korean by now forcing myself to read and write in it, and improving social skills by talking to complete strangers, getting their permission to take their pictures, and publishing them ONLINE, all in a social environment that one might say is actually HOSTILE to photographers these days, to say the least.
In any case, I feel like I've come quite a long way as a photographer, learned a lot of skills, and have started something truly new, of which I'm growing ever more proud. I've met some amazing people and our team of writers and content producers is doing wonderful things – this whole project is finally starting to roll.
So I introduce it to you, my loyal readers, to whom I believe I owe an explanation, and an apology for being absent in days of late.
What does this mean? Well, I felt the need to explain and let it all out because I've been feeling this divide starting to become much more artificial and burdensome than it has to be. I'm doing so much shooting and other things on the streets of Seoul now, but was starting to feel stupid that I couldn't reveal much of it here on this site. And what's there to hide?
This site will stay what it is, the other site will continue to develop into what it is. This site is where I think and fret and get serious, while the other site is where I'm having fun and being absolutely fabulous. But sometimes, there will be overlap, as in the fact that "FeetManSeoul.com" has come to represent more than just a single person, but the idea of fashion-in-motion, on real people, of moving, walking, talking on the street.
So we're already working on audio tours of Seoul – the first I've ever seen them done, and in BOTH Korean and English – and we've already got 3 in the bag, and are busy recording one or two a week right now. Some of those will be cross-posted here on the Metropoliticking in Seoul podcast, simply because it's a perfect fit. I've been doing a lot of other audio recording as well, but just not putting them up, because I've been fretting about how to separate the two projects – now, that's no longer a concern.
You're going to see us doing a fashion column or two for some traditional magazines out there, and we're a regular face at fashion shows and events now. Our street portraits are going to be examples of not just fashion tracking, but true environmental and people portraiture; I just feel good about where that work is going.
And we have several other columnists going on the site, doing everything from fashion diaries to VJ's to photographers. We're developing some good people and are looking for more creative souls – drop us a line.
[Fresh face and new columnist Yan]
In its present, street fashion-oriented iteration, the site's very young – we only just started maturing into something worth inviting people in to look at, even though we've been positive about where we've been going for almost a year now, since it became more than a mere experimental photo project.
We just changed the design a few days ago from the design we've had since nearly the beginning, as a sign of our new public face, and a new outlook on the future. So we – not just me – invite you to come take a look.
And as for this site, now I feel much more free to stop boxing myself in and produce more good work, since so much of what I considered "the good stuff" kept getting placed over onto the other site. Now, I can feel free to make the most use out of my work out on the streets in general, and simply publish in the venue it fits best, as opposed to spending useless energy nixing good content for Metropolitician just because it might expose the "secret" other site. That's just silly, and I respect my readership (as well as the good I believe social commentary like mine may do) too much to just continue neglecting it.
So there it is. Metropolitican and FeetManSeoul and SeoulGlow, all doing similar things, but from different angles. When the first two get on their feet enough to warrant it, I will get SeoulGlow going again. Perhaps I jumped the gun on that one, since the publishing was so labor-intensive. But I'm writing, shooting, and recording, and simply trying to streamline my already-existing hobbies into a more manageable stream, into something that can possible pay the bills and give me time back from having to work-work for a living.
And then I can get back to the dissertation, which I actually, really, really do want to finish. But I'm not going to stop shooting, so I figure I'll try to make that pay for the time it will inevitably take from my overall schedule. So, hopefully this master plan of streamlining my endeavors, focusing them behind at least one commercial possibility, and trying to use it all to get ahead will work.
And if it doesn't, I'll still learn a lot and enjoy myself trying.
