ABSTRACT:
Accidental Photographer in North Korea: Touristic Desire,
Liminal Subjectivity, and Back Seung-woo's Blow-up (2007)
Sohl Lee (University of Rochester)
For artist Back Seung Woo, his journey to Pyongyang in 2001 during the “Sunshine Policy” era granted him the rare opportunity to photograph the Communist city. The North Korean authority’s confiscation of some negatives, however, forced the artist to resort to an unusual method of post-production—he enlarged interesting details that the camera had inadvertently captured and that had also fortunately escaped the censor. This discovery of “unintentionality” in his practice forms the basis for his photography series, Blow Up (2007), which conjures up, when displayed in a gallery, a spectacular wall of forty 20 by 24-inch images of people, street life, and urban landscape in Pyongyang.
This paper situates Back’s series within the larger popular practice
of tourism and tourist photography that emerged during the Sunshine
Policy era (1998-2007), where the South Korean relationship with, and
representation of, North Korea drastically transformed. Photography
and camera, for one thing, were invented during the early 19th
century, when the development of railroads promoted a new mass
cultural form—tourism. The invention of photography played a vital
role in congealing the European imperialist desires for the exotic
Other (in North Africa and Middle East) onto the physical surface
(i.e. glass, copper, paper, etc.). Considering photography as the
first visual medium of modern mass culture, this paper explores how
the unprecedented emergence of South Korea-to-North Korea tourism
during the past decade transformed inter-Korean interaction, one that
is heavily configured by the widely available photographic
practice—of opening the camera shutter at the site, editing the
photographs, and showing them to friends and family back in South
Korea. Furthermore, the discussions of photographic medium
specificities—indexicality, the alleged capacity of “truth claims”
behind the appearances, camera as mechanical apparatus and prosthetic
eye, and the politics of self/other involved in photojournalism and
tourist photography—serve as a productive departing point from which
to discern the ways in which such photographs of North Korea as
Blow Up contribute to the South Korean collective relationship
with North Korea, a country that stands at a safe remove from the
global visual landscape in the age of Internet, social networking and
camera phones. By closely examining the visual language of Blow Up,
this paper attempts at a metaphorical reading of the blurry
photographic surface, abstract figuration of Pyongyang residents, and
display strategy as visualizing the possibility of border-crossing,
liminal subjectivity, and non-oppositional relationship.
Sohl Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Graduate Program in
Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, U.S.A.
She is currently working on her dissertation, which investigates
works by contemporary artists who practice sociopolitical
interventions into national identity, urban development, questions of
ethics, and contemporaneity in South Korea. Her research interests
include contemporary visual cultures in East Asia, discourses of
modernities, institutional critique, and curatorial practices. Her
work has appeared in such publications as Yishu: Journal for
Contemporary Chinese Art. She recently co-edited a special issue
titled on East Asian visual cultures in journal InVisible Culture;
the issue is titled “Spectacle East Asia.” In Spring 2010, she was a
visiting scholar at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where she taught
courses on modern and contemporary Asian visual art.