Preface: The Power of Story - 6

Chapter 1: There is nothing without sadness in the race against time.

Under the Thousand-Year-Old Olive Tree | Park No-hae's Photos - 19
A Beast Roars on a Nameless Road | Lee Jeong-jin's Photos - 31
They, too, await scenes of peace | Photo by Yevgeny Mallorekha - 43
What expression are you making? | Erwin Olaf's Photographs - 57
Somewhere Over the Rainbow | Photo by Tim Smith - 69
Shadows Cast Over the Land of Headhunters | Edward Curtis's Photographs - 83
There lived a gold-digging father and a pretty daughter | Joo Myung-deok's photos - 99
Portraits of an Era, Opening the Doors of Time | Kang Woon-gu's Photography - 113
In Search of the Furry Mountain Lodge Keeper and the Asiatic Black Bear | Photo by Kim Geun-won - 125

Chapter 2: Memory is anchored in a steep alley

The Old Hunter's Winter Tale | Photographs by Penty Samalathi - 141
How to Stroll Through Berlin in Style | Ulrich Wüst's Photos - 155
Even the people of Busan didn't know | Park Jong-woo's photos - 169
Playing Bebop in the Gutters of New York | Photograph by William Klein - 183
When he presses the shutter, Goliath swims across the sea. | Jo Chun-man's Photo - 197
Memories of a Lost House | Kang Hong-gu's Photos - 209
Black Sky and White Earth | Photographs by Seung-gu Kim - 223
Ghosts Wandering Treasure Island | Kim Shin-wook's Photos - 235
Homo Photocus, Erasing the Boundaries of Photography | Hwang Gyu-tae's Photography - 247

References - 261

Finding Hope in a Battlefield of Poverty and Conflict

Park No-hae's work is love.
That is also 'love of the soles of the feet'.
Since your head and heart have no choice but to follow where your feet go, you can meet people, think, and feel wherever your feet go.
The work of the hands is also to record the traces of the feet.
One is holding a pen and writing in a notebook, while the other is pressing the shutter of a camera.
For Park No-hae, the notebook was an external hard drive that aided his memory, while the camera was a means of communication that allowed him to overcome language barriers.
It is difficult to capture sensational scenes with Park No-hae's old, small film camera.
But for photographers who are waiting for something, it could be a very suitable machine.
So, Park No-hae wanted to “seep into the roots of life where that incident occurred.”

Park No-hae says that a photograph is “the soles of my feet standing on the scene, the soles of my feet kissing the earth, the kiss of love imprinted on my two feet, the imprint of that soul.”
In other words, Park No-hae does not pursue sensational moments in scenes of dire poverty and conflict.
What Park No-hae wanted to capture in his photographs were the roots and fingerprints of poverty and conflict.
And so, I tried to approach them with a heart of awe, not pity, and see their complete appearance.
Park No-hae has been visiting places where war has occurred since the US invaded Iraq in 2003.
What he does there is stand by those suffering from war.
An olive tree in Beirut, Lebanon, which survived the bombing, is covered in gray dust.
He says that the olive tree, which is said to live for a thousand years, has been given and offered without reservation.

On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.
Yevgeny Malloleka, the Ukrainian photojournalist who brought the horrors of war to the world, left for the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol the day before.
He expected that Mariupol would be bombed more harshly than the capital, Kyiv, because of its geopolitical importance.
On March 9, Russia bombed a maternity hospital.
Yevgeny Mallorecca filmed a pregnant woman descending the chaotic hospital stairs.
What he left behind, risking his life, was not just visual evidence of Russian atrocities.
He recorded specific, individual sufferings, not vague statements about the horrors of war.
Rather than the feelings of compassion felt by the typist, it contained the pain and anger of the victims of war, and the hope of winning the war.

From painter Jang Wook-jin to novelist Kim Seung-wook,
Capturing the decisive moment

Kang Woon-gu believes that the subjects of the photo must win in order for the photo to be captured in a way that reflects that person's true self.
While there are people like painter Jang Wook-jin who are oblivious to the presence of a photographer, there are also sensitive people like novelist Park Tae-sun who freeze as soon as they see a camera.
Kang Un-gu has been capturing the faces of writers and artists for half a century.
I didn't go out of my way to seek out famous people.
They met by chance.
He said, “To properly photograph a person, you have to go out and find the place where that person is staying.
“This is the only way to capture the right light in your photos,” he says.

Somewhere in Seoul, during the dark days of curfew, where sunlight pouring through the windows creates diagonal lines of light and shade, Kang Woon-goo and Kim Seung-ok are facing each other.
Kim Seung-ok leans against the wall, holding a newspaper in his hand, and looks at Kang Woon-gu.
At this time, Kang Woon-gu catches the flickering light from Kim Seung-ok's face.
Kang Woon-gu says:
“A person’s aura radiates from the unique environment he or she has created while staying there for a long time.
Light and shadow pouring from its own space constantly intersect over people's faces.
Decisions are always made by those who are being photographed.
I silently accepted their actions.” Ultimately, the decisive moment was different for each person.


Family is a source of stories, like a spring that never dries up, even if you spend a lifetime writing it.
Joo Myung-deok says, “Family is a stairway to heaven, a place where naked children play together in the boundless sky and the quiet, distant seashore, and my beloved Clementine.”
Joo Myung-deok is a first-generation auteur photographer representing Korea.
His 'Korean Family' is a series of photographs that document the lives of people living in this country during the transition from extended families to nuclear families.
Joo Myung-deok traveled around the country taking pictures of Korean families.
[Korean Family, Nonsan] features forty-six people, including a dog bowing down to the camera.

Playing bebop in the gutter of New York

An editor of the fashion magazine Vogue, after seeing William Klein's photographs, criticized them, saying, "The focus is dull, the composition is tilted, the picture is shaky, and the frame mercilessly cuts off the body and facial features."
But Klein said, “I felt free.
“Photography has been a great joy to me,” he said, revolting against the stereotypical swing jazz and enjoying the spontaneity and freedom of a beatnik who was crazy about bebop jazz.
He wanted to create a photo book that was “rude, rough, and ink-splattered.”
“The camera can surprise us,” he says, and capture “the unexpected.”

The fashion photographs left behind by William Klein are special.
Model Antonio getting out of a yellow taxi, Dolores hailing a taxi with a large dog in tow, and Sandra hailing a taxi as seen through a full-length mirror in Times Square.
He expanded the scope of fashion photography, which had previously been limited to indoor studios, to the streets.
The scene where women glance at Simon and Nina as they cross the street makes us think about how far the designer's extravagant clothes are from real life, and how everything on the street feels like nothing more than an upper-class accessory.

Erwin Olaf expresses the anxiety and fear that emanates from the humorous yet sad aspects of everyday life through a series of 'April Fool's Day' photos.
He became a photo model himself and dressed up as a clown wearing a white hat and white mask.
But the clown may seem funny, but he leaves a scary aftertaste.
The waxy white mask creates an uncomfortable feeling.
The clown's white mask is imbued with an uneasy feeling of uncertainty about what form it might take.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Olaf chose clowns to express the fear he felt in the face of city lockdowns.
But the clown's shopping spree ended in failure.
All that remains in his plastic-gloved hands is his handbag.
Such personal experiences connect to the social phenomena of disconnection and confinement that consumerist societies face.


Documenting Hutterite, Ulsan, and Busan

Tim Smith says that Hutterites “have the most successful communal culture in the Western world.”
Here, it would be okay to replace 'Western' with 'capitalism'.
The Hutterites, a utopia on Earth, lived a 'different life' free from capital and power.
He waits until he can feel himself a part of the Hutterite community.
That's his photography.
Tim Smith's photographs of the Hutterites fall into three broad categories.
The first are natural images captured by him, who has become almost transparent.
The second are scenes where the photographer is aware of the presence but doesn't really care.
The third are photographs that clearly show the photographer's presence and express themselves.


Jo Chun-man takes pictures of the Ulsan Heavy Industries Industrial Complex.
He was connecting pieces of iron, sending sparks flying like grains of rice, and he picked up the camera, saying, "Let's take pictures of where I lived and what I did!"
He was a welder for a shipyard subcontractor.
'Industry Korea' is the title of Jo Chun-man's photo series that began in 2013.
He is the only industrial photographer in Korea and the only photographer in the world to capture industrial images of heavy industry.
Jo Chun-man climbs up to his subjects' eye level or higher, carrying his camera to show them that the vast landscape of Korean heavy industry is worth seeing.
The scenery of petrochemical plants is like that.
Horizontal and vertical woven pipes, cylindrical and spherical storage tanks, and chimneys towering high into the sky.
He considers the machine as a living being.
Jo Chun-man's photographs can be called 'the natural history of Korean industry.'

Park Jong-woo took detailed still road views to complete a map of Busan from his childhood.
He meets his beloved grandmother on a steep hillside called 'Kkakkomak', encounters the unusually tall and huge chimney of a Busan bathhouse, encounters stairs on the hillside, and encounters water tanks on the roof. He visits the docks, the market, the Haeundae railroad, the breakwater, and alleyways.
How did he encounter the pot-bellied man sitting on a table in a hole-in-the-wall shop, chugging a glass of soju, the woman delivering food from the fish market with a tray on her head, and the woman performing a trick of flipping a 3,000-won jeon (rice cake) by levitating it? That's how Park Jong-woo became Korea's leading documentarian, documenting Busan through his photographs.