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.