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[Discussion 1: Archiving Methodology for Photography]

 

Archiving a Photographer as an Artist: Scope and Special Considerations

 

Park Ju Seok (Senior Researcher for the Joo Myung-Duck Digital Archiving Research Project, Professor at Myongji University)

 

  On a personal level, gathering information about different artworks’ provenance and canonical importance is not unlike collecting artwork itself. It is primarily a pleasure-seeking activity, and the choices that one makes are purely a matter of personal taste. If an artist tries to document and archive his or her own works, such an endeavor is driven by the fundamental desire to leave behind a trace of one’s existence. Such autoethnography is part vanity project and part cultural marker for future generations of art lovers and connoisseurs to discover, contemplate and cherish. However, when an art archiving project is carried out under an institutional initiative, it takes on a completely different meaning. Public art archives are the records of select historical, social, and cultural circumstances and are predetermined by a top-down effort to map a certain cultural sphere. Through the accumulation of documents once in the hands of an individual artist, the personal records tend to be transformed into collective and institutional records used and available as cultural and historical resources. This is precisely what makes documenting and archiving any body of work by an artist an essential task for the public sector. It is the aim of the Korean Artist Digital Archive project of the Korea Art Management Service to record and catalog the work of acclaimed (and sometimes internationally lauded) Korean artists, to ensure  a mark of patronage and to borrow from Donald Preziosi and Johanne Lamoureuz, the museum, like the archive, “has been central to the social, ethical, and political formation of the citizenry of modernizing nation-states” (2006: 56) and this is no less important for the history of Korean art.

 

  Unlike traditional media such as painting or sculpture, photography is an art form that uses mechanical or electronic processes to achieve its desired result in the reproduction/digitalization of reality. Due to the media’s distinctive nature, archiving the works of photographers, including Joo Myung-Duck with whom the present research was concerned, demands principles that are distinct from those governing the archiving of other kinds of artists, such as painters or sculptors. The archiving principles for photography must promote the proper understanding of the nature and significance of the medium and the context in which photographic works or practices are produced and disseminated, as well as facilitate the appropriate preservation and management of archived information/images. It is also essential for archivists of photography to have an understanding and appreciation of the medium’s technical aspects, including darkroom processes such as developing and printing. Archivists must also be equipped with essential knowledge about photographic genres, photography’s own history and the recent formation of its as subfield within art history, and institutional spaces that specialize in photography’s exhibition and promotion.

 

  A dictionary defines, “Photography captures the external world with a camera and creates visually recognizable images on a dry plate coated with a light-sensitive medium, photographic paper, or an electronic display by virtue of reflective rays, such as visible light, infrared, ultraviolet light, X-rays, gammarays, and electron rays.” Exceptionally, “photograms can be   produced without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive materials such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. Also, photomontages can be produced as the result of making a composite photography. In addition, digital photography founded upon the image formation principle of digital camera became a dominant kind of photography.”

 

  The special characteristics of photography, as defined above by generic terms and by specialists in art history, must be taken into account when archiving or designing an archiving system for photographers, as there are fundamental differences that set photography apart from other media, such as painting and sculpture. The archiving system and its procedure should reflect the changing status of photography in the history of Korean art, as well as the shifts in how photographers perceive the medium here in Asia and globally. I make up principal considerations in archiving photographic works, wishing that they could serve as guidelines for archiving projects in the future. Those are as follows;

 

①     In Korea, photography was not recognized as an art form by official art institutions until the mid-1980s. The paradigm shift and institutionalization should be explained briefly.  On the one hand, the Korean art world’s long-held prejudices against photography was due to its mass media appeal, amateurism and connection to journalism and its mechanical reproducibility.  On the other hand, the lack of a sense of urgency on the part of the photographers  to demonstrate more widely to elites and academics in Korea of claim the influential communication methods it possessed, became more cultic as photographers wished to keep the medium within an insiders community of practitioners. Later, the belated institutional acknowledgement of photography as an art form was far from a compelling priority for photography who sought different statuses for the medium. Thus, it would be a mistake  to evaluate the work of senior photographers like Joo Myung-Duck, who was active before and after the mid-1980s, in terms of exhibition career because institutional visibility is just one metric of cultural and art world success. In fact, up until the 1960s, photographs submitted to photographic competition elicited the aesthetic standard of Korean photography. The period from the 1970s to the 1980s can now be seen historically as the heyday of photo- journalism, during which the photography featured in magazines and photographic monographs each format radiating confidence, prestige and professionalism for these two genres. It was only after the mid-1980s that solo or group exhibitions became primary platforms that guided and shaped the aesthetic norms for photography. Therefore, the shifting trends in the history of Korean photography need to be reckoned with an assessment of an individual photographer’s career and photographic production.

 

②     Photographic images are produced from original image sources such as glass plates, a film negative, or a digital file through the process of chemical or digital printing. A photographer can create numerous prints from a single original image source, either as reproduced image in prints, printed photographic image, or digital images. Even though images can be created from the same original source, the time when the images are produced affects the result of prints due to different types of paper or developing solutions. A final image can also be different from the initial print in terms of the changing aesthetic preferences and shifts in the sensibility of the photographer. Thus, different prints from the single source were inevitably considered as separate works of art or prints.

 

③     At the outset of the history of photography, the daguerreotype process produced an irreproducible photographic image. With the introduction of a glass plate and the negative-positive system, a photographer no longer needed to print all their exposures. In particular, the advent of the film era “actualities” in 1895 caused the number of photos taken to grow dramatically. Photographers most often print only one out of the thirty-six exposures in a roll film. This is their way of controlling accidental or fortuitous elements that play into photographic results. This leaves many exposures on a negative strip unprinted. Then it poses a problem for the archivist, who faces the question of whether all the negatives from a roll film should be archived or not. However, this question is beyond an archivist’s capacity to be definitive and/or judicious as it depends on the intention of the photographer.

 

④     Photography is an art form which relies on mechanical (or digital) devices to produce its images. As a result, the equipment of a photographer is a critical factor that impacts the nature and quality of photographer’s photographic production. Such equipment such as the camera itself, the tripod, lightings gear, enlargers, films and chemical agents, along with technical processes spaces to develop, print, wash, dry, contact print and enlarge, or dry mount are all very important considerations that need to be thoroughly documented in a systematic manner to better understand a photographer’s métier.

 

⑤ As aforementioned, a film can produce numerous prints. Sometimes, prints are made and distributed independently of the photographer’s will or by the current owner of the negative or digital file of an original image. It is important to comprehend the concepts of vintage prints, original prints, and reproduction in order to determine the aesthetic value and significance of the work. Vintage prints are the productions of a photographer within 10 years from the date of the shoot. Meanwhile, original prints means the ones created more than 10 years after the date of the shoot, either by the photographer or by a third-party specialist, using the original negative or a glass plate. Photos published in newspapers and magazines are considered reproductions. Reproductions created by re-photographing a printed photo are deemed of little art historical significance and are excluded from consideration.

 

⑤     There are several important factors to consider when documenting the dimension of a photographic work. Up until the 1970s, most photos were printed in the so-called “paper full” mode—in other words, prints without margins or white spaces. After the 1980s, the “film full” mode became the standard photo printing method so that the totality of a photographic image on film is printed without making adjustments to the size of the print paper. The print paper tends to be larger than the image on film, and results in leaving margins on print itself. Therefore, an archivist needs to decide whether margins should be measured as the size of a photo. Some photographers include the size of the frame as the measurement of the dimension of their photos. Archivists set up and maintain the consistent rule to measure the dimension. The same criteria must be applied to all works of the same photographer.

 

⑥     A photograph’s title is one essential consideration interrogated by an archivist. In Korea from the 1920s to the 1960s, photography contests were the main venue for photographers to present their works. At the time of submission to a contest, photographic works were generally given a unique title, which followed the convention of paintings. However, from the 1970s, the formats of photo stories and photo-essays gained popularity, and individual photos in the series were no longer given a separate subtitle, individual title. This is still the case today as most photographers preferred the format of a series of prints. Therefore, an archiving system must account for the practice of giving a title for specific photography. Joo Myung-Duck added the location and date of the shoot for the subtitle of his series.

 

 

[Discussion 2: Critical Review]

 

On the Photography of Joo Myung-Duck

 

Park Ju Seok (Senior Researcher for the Joo Myung-Duck Digital Archiving Research Project, Professor at Myongji University)

 

1. Joo Myung-Duck’s Place in the History of Korean Photography

 

  Joo Myung-Duck (born 1940) is one of the leading photographers in Korea with a career spanning six decades. The photo exhibition titled Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage in 1966, and the photographic monograph titled Mixed Names, a collection of photos shown at the exhibition Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage published in 1966, and the Lost Landscape series from the 1990s are considered to have redefined and enriched Korean photography. Joo’s photography has demonstrated the social issues from his social consciousness and critical perspective. He also recorded beautiful cultural heritage of Korea in faithful manners. It is also a loving gaze at the rivers and hills of his country. This variegated photographic career has allowed him to forge a distinctive photographic aesthetic of his own. His career has extended to all genres of photography. He is also versed in portraiture and fashion photography. He also ran a publisher named Sigak, and published numerous books on photography. The breadth of his photographic career is all encompassing and impressive.

 

  No doubt, Joo holds a very special place in the history of Korean photography. Although the word “special” means “unusual” and “out of the ordinary,” Joo’s case is meant differently. What makes him special is paradoxically his “ordinariness” in choice of subject matter that later became “extraordinary” when exhibited and consumed by peers and the public.  Neither his life nor his work has been unusual or out of the ordinary. He has led a life of an ordinary Korean man. His career has followed a path that has been regarded as commonplacel for a Korean photographer. He has taken on subject matter that should be of interest to all photographers, born and raised in this country, and has produced mostly classical-style photos that are little concerned with formal experimentation. Joo’s uniqueness and prominence precisely arises from his utter ordinariness – or lack of desire to elevate his artistic status against that of painting and sculpture – and in terms of his career trajectory, which was modest in comparison to many contemporaries that study abroad, had relatively unrestricted travel experience or showed in prestigious biennales and shows in Europe and the United States.

 

  The subjects of the country Joo has insistently tackled in his photography is universal and common for many Korean artists, and they would address at least once at some point in their careers. Joo has dealt with the issue of land in his oeuvre for six decades in consistent manner, which makes him special. Such dedication and prolificacy have been rare, at least in Korea. Meanwhile, in spite of the ordinary nature of his subject matter and methodology, Joo has created a remarkably original visual style and aesthetic never before encountered in the history of global photography. It is a special feat to create the extraordinary out of the ordinary. Joo also stands out as the first full-time Korean photographer who has had a financially viable career without having to turn to commercial photography to make ends meet.

 

  By examining his body of work from his 60-year career, one can easily see the steps leading from his formative years as an aspiring young amateur photographer to his growth as an established artist and then to his eventual status as a virtuoso with a camera, with his own distinctive photographic style. Initially, looking through his works over the decades might be a perplexing experience. The documentary photography from Joo’s formative years has so little in common with his recent work such as the  dark tonality exemplified in Lost Landscape, which became his signature style, thus one might not think them produced by a single  photographer. However, upon closer examination, one can tell the hidden interconnectedness that linked his different themes and also how the content and the style correspond organically with each other.

 

  There are three major achievements that make Joo’s journey extraordinary from the perspective of the history of Korean photography.

 

  First, Joo has remained true to his identity as a Korean and embodied his love for his country and for photography at the time of rapid Westernization. This commitment to Korean subject matter and ethnically specific photography led him to culminate in an original and unprecedented visual aesthetic for the country, yet it follows the nationalization model for most media in world.

 

  Secondly, even though Joo frequently finds himself in disagreement with fellow photographers, both senior and junior to him, on issues related to photographic philosophy, he has also always gone out of his way to help them and defend their interests at the cost of his personal sacrifice. He tried to preserve and extend the legacy of deceased or elderly photographers and spent much time in his darkroom to print their works, turning them into publications and exhibition, which attracted the public recognition in the end.

 

  Thirdly, Joo has never held a job outside the field photography or its wider creative sector, except for a short period he spent working for the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo. He is the first Korean photographer to have made a living from his photography alone without having to run a commercial photo studio or shoot advertising photos, as most of Korean photographers have had to manage to continue their creative practices. Nowadays, there are quite a large number of full-time photographers, but the situation from the 1960s to the 1990s when Joo had been active as a photographer was totally different. A freelance photographer was almost impossible to survive in those days. However, Joo have been thriving as a freelance photographer and continue to be productive in his works.

 

2. Joo’s Life and Work

 

  Joo Myung-Duck was born in 1940. He is currently over 80 years old and is still spry and maintains his love for all things photographic. He married his wife, a lifelong companion in 1970, and have a son. She passed away some years ago. 

 

  Joo was born in Anak, a town near Haeju, Hwanghae-do in 1940, toward the end of the colonial period when Korea was increasingly forced to assist or were indentured servants to Japan’s war efforts. Anak located in the northwest of Korean peninsula was long known as the repository of crops and there were many wealthy landowners in this area. The region is also famous for Guwolsan, a divine mountain associated with the legend of Dangun and scatted with numerous dolmens and ancient tombs. 

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  Joo left Anak at a young age and was brought up and educated in Seoul, which “turned him into a native of Seoul, or a Seoulite” according to his own words. He has often commented on his feeling about hometown, “I cannot visit my native land. People talk about their hometown and long to come back home someday. But as someone who was forced to leave my hometown, I had to try to forget it. Those who can return home are so fortunate.”

 

  Joo was first introduced to photography while studying history at Kyung Hee University. In the 1960s, he joined The Research Group of Modern Photography (Hyeondae sajin yeonguhoe), a representative research society, even though it is a sort of an amateur coterie of likeminded photographers. The members conducted academic research on photography and published a newsletter called Saan on an irregular basis. With Lee Hyung-Rok as the lead instructor for the group, the group members included Kim Seon-Hong, Jeon Mong-Gak, Kim Hyo-Yeol, Kim Haeng-Oh, Lee Sang-Gyu, and Joo Myung-Duck. Saan was issued as a handwritten newsletter in a limited number of copies, but it covered essential topics of photography including the issues of both artistic and technical dimension, which could be of interest to professional and amateur photographers.

 

  Following his formative years with The Research Group of Modern Photography, Joo first gained recognition when he held the solo exhibition, Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage at the Central Public Information Center Gallery in 1966. Prior to this, he mounted a trio exhibition with Gam Gwan and Kim Seung-Won at the Sinmun Hoegwan Gallery in September 1963. Gam Gwan presented sixteen pieces, Kim Seung-Won had nine, and Joo showed eighteen, respectively. Mr. Bong, one of Joo’s photos shown in this exhibition, was awarded a prize in a photo contest organized by the US Camera society in the same year. In late January 1965, Joo held his first solo exhibition titled “Small Photo Exhibition on Children’s Themes” at a gallery Salon d’Alliance. The two exhibitions were a challenge and an achievement of ambitious scale and vision, where this rookie photographer who had only recently started snapping chronotopes of the nation took Korea by storm.

 

  Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage became an important turning point in Joo’s photographic career. The exhibition is of great significance for the history of Korean photography, and it simultaneously was meaningful for Joo to set him on the path to become a professional photographer. This exhibition featured portraits of mixed-race orphans, a tragic byproduct of the Korean War, and daily scenes at the orphanage located in Bulgwang-dong, Seoul, and it drew xenophobic comments and led to tremendous social repercussions since the topic and the format was highly unusual by the standard of those days.

 

  It drew attention from media media. The editorials in two newspapers were written in response to Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage in order to call for the reexamination of the mixed-race orphan issue and take measures to ensure their welfare was considered. The exhibition also made the headline in the culture section of several newspapers. The photos shown in Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage were published in a book titled Mixed Names (Seokkyeojin ireumdeul) by Seongmungak in 1969. It was unprecedented in the history of Korean photography in that the photographic monologue focused on on a single theme in a photo essay format. 

 

According to Joo: “The exhibition Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage was held only three and a half year after I started my photographic practice. Prior to that show, I had a couple of exhibitions but they were small-scale exhibitions. I held an exhibition at the gallery of the Press Hall (Sinmun hoegwan) with two of my high school [classmates] alumni. It seemed so absurd to hold an exhibition because we just started to take photos. It was less than one year after I began my photographic practice. I didn’t care what others thought of me and just did my own thing. I regularly visited the Holt Orphanage and took photos. I was a sort [of considered] a maverick by the standard of those days. At any rate, I exhibited my photos, which were accompanied by [written] text. The text was written by my wife. We were dating at the time.”

 

  At the time when his photographic monologue Mixed Names was released in 1968, Joo was hired by JoongAng Ilbo as a photojournalist for the magazine Monthly Joongang. He started to publish photo-essay-style features on a variety of social issues. He designed, shot, and edited an impressive number of photo series for the news magazine which included Others’ Land in Korea, Korean Family, Silver-Haired Koreans, The Motherland of Poems, Metamorphosis of Korea, and Lyrical Journey to the Land. His works during the productive years set a new milestone in Korean documentary photography as well as Korean photography as a whole. From the formal and aesthetic dimension, Others’ Land in Korea and Korean Family exemplified an embryonic form of Joo’s distinctively critical gaze toward a hyper-developing society which was persistent in his later works. As the news magazine allowed spaces for more in-depth documentary and extensive projects that lasted a longer period than newspapers, it was an ideal platform for Joo to convey his photographic vision and social consciousness, leading to significant influence on society.

 

  Joo became a photojournalist for the JoongAng Ilbo in 1968. The time coincided with the period when Park Chung-Hee regime started to enforce increasingly repressive and authoritarian political policies that censored media and approved a new Constitution, the so-called Yusin Constitution. The national economic development plans were implemented by the Park regime, leading to a rapid process of industrialization and urbanization financed by the government, private businesses and loans and reparation monies from abroad. During this period, Joo’s photographic projects took on various themes in relation to the identity and shifts of Korean society, along with pressing social issues. Joo mentioned about Korean Family, his representative series of socially engaged photography as follows:

 

“Initially, there was no special intention about it. Our news desk was looking for an idea for a feature by browsing Japanese and American news magazines. When I shot for the series Korean Family, I was inspired by the book Family of an American photographer named Ken Heyman. Heyman traveled around the world and took photos of fathers and sons, as well as grandfathers and grandsons. We had an editorial meeting to discuss a similar project as that of Family. We agreed that we should depict the shifts of the structure of Korean families from extended to nuclear families, as well as on the stages of an average Koreans’ life from birth to death.”

 

  Joo’s passionate interest in Korean society eventually gave way to less polemical and socially conscious works such as Lyrical Journey to the Land and The Motherland of Poems, indebted to American photo reportage and social realism during the 1930s Moving away from family and communities, his interest switched to the hinderlands, the natural environment ,and architecture in Korea. The shift in Joo’s thematic focus was not just the result of a shift of his interest but also had much to do with the repressive social and political climate during the Yusin era of the 1970s.

 

“I thought that it was not meaningful at all to shoot photos that will never be published. That was the reason I gave up journalistic photography. I thought that journalistic photography caused the viewers to enhance their social consciousness. But it was not permissible at that time since the mass media was under the surveillance of harsh political regime. Such condition was not congruous to my vision on photography. So, when someone asked me if I would be able to publish my photos, my answer was unfortunately ‘no’ at that time.”

 

  He departed from Monthly Joongang in 1973. Since then, he refocused his attention to the cultural heritages of Korea and documented historical sites which persisted in his photographic images until the 1980s. The works in this period were published in photographic monographs including The Motherland of Poems (Seongmungak, 1971), Ceramics of the Yi Dynasty (Kyoto: Chuokoronshinsha, 1974), Totem Poles of Korea (Youlhwadang, 1976), Seongyojang House, Gangneung (Youlhwadang, 1980), Kim’ House, Jeongeup (Youlhwadang, 1980), Korean Traditions (Gukje Gwangwang Munhwasa, 1981), and Fort Suwon (Gwangjang, 1981). The photos of cultural heritage sites were born out of Joo’s deep affection for his homeland. As early as 1972, he held his solo exhibition at Shinsegae Gallery and its was titled “Heonsa,” meaning “I dedicate my photos to my homeland.” Later in 1981, he held another exhibition titled “Lyricism of Korea” on historic sites scattered across the Peninsula. In 1985, Joo’s cultural heritage photos were also published in Japan in a book titled Korean Spaces (Tokyo: Kyuryudo).

 

  Meanwhile, Joo’s involvemen in the editing of Wolgan Haein, the monthly newsletter of Haeinsa Temple in 1985 led to a sustained relationship with the temple’s clergy, allowing him to develop a deeper understanding of Buddhism. He published a book Door Designs of Korean Buddhist Temples in 1986, and Froth and Shadows that portrayed an eminent Korean Zen matster Seongcheol in 1988. In 1993, he released another photo book Monk Seongcheol including the images of the funeral ceremony in memory of him right after he passed away. The three books were eventually published by Janggyeokgak.

 

  After gaining prominence in photojournalism and documentary photography, Joo turned to his country’s natural landscape and eventually unveiled the so-called “black landscapes of Joo Myung-Duck” to the world. Joo’s landscape photography, widely perceived to mark a dramatic departure from his previous works, indeed constituted a turning point in his photography. According to Joo’s own words, his landscape photography allowed him to finally step out of the influence of Japanese photographer Hamaya Hiroshi, his longtime mentor. His landscape photos was delivered in the exhibition Lost Landscape in 1993. The solo exhibition An die Photographie in 1999 presented photos of Korean landscapes that were completely submerged in his signature “black tone.” His passion for the natural landscapes of Korea eventually extended over to urban landscape, resulting in the show City Scenes at a gallery Style Cube Zandari in 2004, and Landscape at Gallery Ihn in 2005.

 

  Since the mid-1990s, there has been a resurgence of interest in Joo’s body of work from those scholars in academia and the wider photography community, as well as the art world at large. An exhibition Korean Spaces that showcased Joo’s cultural heritage photos was mounted at Aichi Art Center in Nagoya, Japan in 1995. A second edition of Mixed Names, an exemplar of Joo’s documentary works that had helped set him on the path toward a professional photographer was published again, this imprint became a classic in the canon of Korean photography. The book Early Works of Joo Myung-Duck, containing a selection of his earliest works, was published in 2000. The Museum of Photography, Seoul mounted the show Incheon Chinatown 1968 in 2002. Gyeongju Art Sonje Museum held a retrospective exhibition of Joo, putting his complete works from his initial years and his latest work on display. Fifteen years after the exhibition, Joo still remains an active photographer.

 

  Let us think about Joo’s documentary and landscape over the long time period. The photos from the series Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage, Lost Landscape, or An die Photographie look drastically dissimilar in terms of their thematic resonances and style. It is hard to believe that those were created by the same photographer. However, upon closer examination, one realizes how the different phases of his photographic career over a long time period were logically interconnected. The historical and aesthetic significance of Joo’s journey as a photographer resides precisely in the fact that his path has evolved “naturally” without going against the historical progress, and showed a variety of styles enough to demonstrate his own development. In the year Joo turnining to his age 60, he published a book on the collection of his early works and mentioned his own work and ambitions;

 

“I wanted to show what my works look like when I first started as a photographer. As for the direction of my future work, I am still pondering on whether I should follow the path to fine art or documentary photography. My photography has changed three times and it could be divided into three different phases. If I could, I would like to transform my work twice more. It may happen if God permits. If not, it would not be achievable.”

 

3. The Aesthetic Formation of Joo’s “Black” Series

 

  Joo’s landscape photos could be seen as the documentary of nature. The terminology ‘landscape’ (punggyeong) could be applied to refer to his photographs as part of a genre. However, we need to keep it in mind that he began his photographic career with the conviction in photography’s capacity to document some socio-cultural objectivity and this belief was still valid to keeps him focused on the naturalistic splendor of the countryside. In that vein, his landscape photos are driven by a desire to document nature as our environment and a place of dwelling for those outside megacities like Seoul.

 

  Joo’s landscape photography is characterized by a wholly original perspective in which famous mountains like Mt. Odae and Mt. Seorak were captured in a trinity of ways: through images of their mid-slope section, in close-up, or appearing like a flattened rockface. In Western landscape photography, the camera tends to focus on the ridgeline of a rocky terrain or the horizon where a mountain or a plain meets the sky to emphasize the grandeur of the scenery. On the other hand, Joo’s photos represented mountains and plains as a habitat for humans themselves, they are meeting points and create socialization spaces through sport (climbing) and leisure (hiking).

 

  His gaze fixed on the natural beauty of Korea and the lives of its people is synonymous with Korean culture to keep alive tradition, something consistent with his philosophy of life and the spirit of his photography as a whole. This is precisely what sets Joo’s landscape apart from the Western landscape, as well as what constitutes his historical significance as a photographer. The well-known black tone in his landscape is the product of his philosophical considerations. However, the black tone is not a monolithic black, devoid of deeper meaning. On a closer inspection of the original prints, one can clearly discern the vitality of small trees and greenbelts that comprise and lead to bucolic tonality.

 

  Black normally means the total absence of light, symbolizing atrophy and decline. At least, this is what the color black represents in the visual language of Western landscape photography. On the other hand, in Joo’s photos, black suggests vitality and the pulsation of life. In this sense, his black is a new hue of black, one distinct and previously unseen in Korean photography or most prints by photographers in different parts of the world. More than just a color, his black tone dominates his own visual language, emerging at the intersection between Joo’s love for the Korean Peninsula and a distinctive sable tonality specific to black and white photography. However, Joo’s black tone invites endless interpretation, partly because he has spared words on it. Several photographers and critics presented their interpretation and assessment on Joo’s landscape from various angles. 

 

  For example, critic Lee Young Joon ruminates about Joo’s pitch-black hue, claiming that “Joo shows mountains in a way that is completely divorced from the convention of representing them as beautiful land features. He also doesn’t seem to be interested in adding a personal stylistic touch … […] … By choosing to print his photos in a way that saturated black became the dominant tone … he seems to be trying to remind us that what we have seen before our eyes is not nature but only an image of nature.” Lee also states in another text about Joo, “his black tone is not so much a symbol with a message as his way to avoid saying something. In this sense, it is similar to an act of erasing. His photos are an ‘act of erasing—erasing the forest, flowers, and grass that meet the camera’s lens.’”

 

  Meanwhile, Cho Woo-Seok, a reporter at a daily newspaper who frequently wrote about Korean photography, stated, “Going beyond a simple representation, Joo is reaching for an abstract resonance,” concluding that Joo’s black tone signifies a transition from representation to abstraction. Shin Jeong-Ah, who curated Joo’s exhibition An die Photographie, at Kumho Museum of Art in 1999, described his black tone photos in terms of an “all-over photographic style, where all parts of an image are evenly connected to other parts, with no part left neglected,” adding that “this series of works where each work is simultaneously a part and a whole mirrors his personal life in which he has conscientiously tried not to neglect anything that is important to him.” Finally, the art critic Yi Joo Heon wrote that Joo’s photos are “photos without a center in which, as a result, no particular hierarchy exists” and that his black tone “reflects his desire to embrace all colors without hierarchical distinction and treat them equally by converging them into one color.”

 

  While all of these statements sound reasonable, they also are mostly based on individual interpretation. It is worthwhile to examine the well-known monochrome paintings of Yves Klein (1928–1962) in order to fully comprehend Joo’s work. Despite their obvious differences in style and approach, Yves Klein and Joo shared commonality in that their works show the preponderance of a single color. Klein is well known for International “Klein Blue” (IKB), a deep blue hue that manifests, visually, a silent, immaterial, and infinite space. According to Klein, his blue is an “immaterial and metaphysical” color, which represents a single color field of “infinity.” In a lecture held at the Sorbonne in 1959, Klein stated, “Blue has no dimensions and rather is beyond all dimensions. This is not the case with other colors. All other colors evoke psychological, physical, or tactile dimensions. Blue, on the other hand, evokes the most abstract things in the world, creating an experience analogous to looking at the sea or the sky. This is why blue exists beyond all dimensions.” Joo’s black may be considered similar to Klein’s blue insofar as it is also an absolute color, definitive and the basis for all of the color spectrum. But his black is also distinct from Klein’s blue in that it is a color created by the medium of photography.

 

  In black-and-white photography, the accumulation of light causes images to turn into black. Photography is made by light and consists of a gradation of shades from black to white, resulting from the varying intensity of light. In this sense, Joo’s black is an accumulation of light and, by extension, an accumulation of time. His nonchalant gaze resting on the hills and plains, as the eternal home of Koreans, is an extension and premonition toward eternity, and the accumulation of this eternity causes the tone of his photos to turn into a velvety black. This is a phenomenon unique to photography, occurring when image-forming processes converge together as a sum of photographic processes. This is precisely why Joo gave these photos the title “To Photography” (An die Photographie). Joo’s black is his way of loving his country and loving photography, the vehicle through which he expresses this love for his homeland.

 

 

4. Photography – A Method of Loving His Homeland

 

  Joo’s photography is the result of his love for Korea, his homeland, and a desire to document its pristine natural beauty. Although notoriously tight-lipped about his works, Joo actually wrote a couple of short essays. In a short text titled “My Modest Homeland,” he wrote about his love for his country:

 

 “At times, not quite often, I think about the word ‘homeland.’ My country, my home, the land where my mother is buried, the country where my parents suffered during the colonial rule and struggled to survive the horrors of war, the country where my children will live. I am not fond of the word ‘homeland,’ as it sounds like a word for those who have lost their country. Nevertheless, I sometimes think of this word, my chest is always filled with emotion.”

 

  He also mentioned the reason he takes photos, following with this sentiment:

 

“I hope to preserve my country’s traditions and its unique aspects that existed independently of the conditions of civilization, prosperity, or pollution. I want to leave this beautiful land in its intact state behind to my son Jeong-Il in its intact state. I want to show the people of my country the bountiful land of their dreams through my photos.”

 

  Photography was invented in the West. As countless studies have pointed out time and again, photography is an ideal apparatus of the human-centered ideology that has dominated the Western world ever since the Renaissance, in which the outside world is subject to the viewpoint of individuals. Archiving Korean photographers offers a window to examine how the camera and photographic principles were introduced and used in Korea, a country with a system of values that is completely different from that of the West, as well as in what ways cultural negotiations and conflicts have been unfolded. Building a comprehensive archive on photographers is critically significant in order to define the identity of Korean photography and Korean culture, and to search for future direction in the study of the history of Korean photography.

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