Openings
Pyongyang, 2011
A few years ago, a friend said to me: “Your images are very lonely now; you pay attention to lonely situations and struggles. It’s a reflection of yourself.” While these words weren’t new to me, I didn’t think they were that visible, or intentional for that matter. He continued: “Your images give a sense [that] you are in a nowhere zone, like a lost child.” I asked him to explain. “Well, they are [a] little sad, to be honest.”
His remarks made me realize that my photographs have always been conversations, first and foremost, with myself. Just as there is no significant text without the author in it, no meaningful photograph is without its composer. The conversations are vulnerable, unguarded, and, with effort, open. They bear my mark, if not immediately visible, of intention, of emotion. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been hesitant to share many images, and seem to drag my feet when it comes to fulfilling requests; I’ve only recently started learning how to extend these conversations with others.
A trip to North Korea a few years ago helped to develop my lessons in the value of photography. While the country’s tumultuous history, human rights abuses, and longstanding totalitarian regime continue to propagate this image, it also serves to conceptually distance itself as an inaccessible place of secrecy and mystery, hiding, at its core, an undeniably human element.
The simple and fragmented images I took from North Korea were attempts to convey a sense of intimacy through distance. Rather than close-up portraits of people, I relied on the dispositions of everyday citizens filling wide, vacant spaces set against grandiose architecture to express the connections and disconnections of life in North Korea – the banality, solemnity, fear, joy, and humanity of life under challenging circumstances.
These images are of Pyongyang and its surrounding areas which service the nation’s powerful and elite and have been put on display for the outside world. They are, by no means, representative of life beyond these borders. Many photos, deemed politically sensitive or compromising, were deleted upon inspection as I left. Today the event reminds me of the value of experience and the ability of it to be shared.