What is Photography?

Lim Sun Ki _ Poet, Professor of French Literature and Language, Yonsei University

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MARCH 2022

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Questions coming to mind again in Kim Woo Young’s photography ​ Why does this exist, and what is it that exists? This ontological question is essential. Art is the answer to such an enquiry. Art is like religion in this sense. To the artist, Kim Woo Young, photography is art and simultaneously religion. That is why he lives in the wilderness, the place of religion and does his work in a temple. ​ To Kim Woo Young, photography is not the art of the moment. To him, photography is to hold eternity in the moment, eternity embracing the world that has lasted until the current moment, and that will emerge after the moment. This approach is romantic. William Blake, a print artist and poet felt the same way. Regarding this romantic aspect of religion, Kim Woo Young’s photography is truly religious. ​ Amazing consistency can be found in the photographs that Kim Woo Young produced when he was 19 and much later in 2021. The consistency is symmetry. Like in Mondrian’s paintings, his work reveals faces by dividing spaces with lines. Those faces are in fact symmetrical, even in some ostensibly asymmetrical works. Linguist, Roman Jakobson dedicated his life, to delving into the world of language, focusing on the concept of symmetry. Why did he do that? Because symmetry is essential. Jakobson thought that symmetry is an intrinsic structure in the nature of all languages. The term structuralism was derived from this notion of Jakobson’s. Kim Woo Young is an essentialist in that he develops structures in the language of photography. In that sense, he is simultaneously ontological and religious. ​ Thus there is no big difference between the two spaces, East and West, or Korea and America. The thing that he is seeking is structure that can be condensed down to symmetry. Symmetry should not be understood as the simple concept of a so-called dichotomy. It is appropriate to regard symmetry as a proportion in the same sense as the golden mean. Proportion should not be mistaken as an exclusive frame. Proportion is like a creative golden rule. Innovative things come from proportion. It is a source of diversity. Human creativity is not about creating something out of nothing. It is the act of creating according to proportion. The ancient Greeks called ‘according to proportion’ analogia. Aristotle claimed that poets especially were excellent at creating according to proportion in Poetics. ​ Kim Woo Young has approached the poetic world through the proportional structure of symmetry. It is superficial to say his Boulevard series is pictorial. The works are not pictorial, but poetic, emerging from the depths. His works of snowy Cheongpyongsa, an old Korean temple and Soswaewon, the Garden of the Joseon Dynasty are also poetic. He has approached a state of poetic tranquility. That is the reason that his recent exhibition’s title is Poetics of Tranquility. The word, poetics here is close to the second concept in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, namely, poetic feelings or poetic expression, rather than academic. His work lies in poetic feelings or the poetic expression of tranquility in the moment. ​ Kim Woo Young’s photography has become a path leading to poetry. The question coming to mind again in his photographic world, ‘What is photography?’ is understood as a question about the relationship between photography and poetry. It is not true that Kim Woo Young started photography as an advertising photographer. He unconsciously started working in the world of analogia at the age of 19. The work was authentic. On the other hand, his advertising photography is a way to confront reality. Advertising has been the most developed rhetorical form since the early 20th century. It is the language of persuading consumers to sell modern products of mass-produced goods. In his first year at university, Kim Woo Young unknowingly entered the world of poetics, and when he returned to Kore a from New York to witness what modern art truly was, he ironically and unconsciously moved his workspace from poetics to rhetoric. He cried a lot in this rhetorical space. He resolutely made a decision, went out through ‘boulevards’ into the wilderness, and positioned himself at his starting point, in the space of poetics. ​ So was his rhetorical era totally meaningless? It was not. While taking advertisement photographs, he felt the distance between images and truth to the fullest. As John Berger puts it, publicity functions as a device for the selective freedom that capitalism offers. (cf. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, 1972. Berger used the word, publicity instead of advertising.) It, however, is not true freedom. Advertising is the process of creating glamour to captivate others, namely, an object of envy. It plays the role of squeezing out consumer’s desire rather than showing beauty as it is. In this process, Kim confronted a negative in which true freedom and pristine beauty were highlighted and desperately needed day by day. Advertising photography is also modern painting. Its form is photography, but its essence is the modern version of painting in some sense. There are numerous advertising photographs borrowing from painting. Borrowing, however, is not the core. The core is that painting was praise for private property. Advertising photography is a genre which transferred the form of art consumption, that is, the praise of private property and possession, from museums to magazines. This aspect enlightened Kim Woo Young, convincing him that fine art photography is different from painting. As Louis Daguerre became a photographer from being a painter, Kim realized that he had to go beyond painting to work as a photographer. That is to say, Kim’s photography, is not pictorial. His photography exists and establishes itself on a path beyond pictorial elements. The starting form of Kim’s photography is in line with the early history of photography. It is both going back to the beginning and simultaneously modern. It is similar to, but in a different way, the contemporary phenomenon, ‘photographie pauvre’. ​ When Kim Woo Young studied at School of Visual Arts in New York, he read Walter Benjamin’s essay. Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is actually an artistic theory of photography. According to Benjamin, when photography began, Europe was on the verge of socialism, that is, the center of society was shifting from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat. In such a situation, traditional art experienced a crisis, and some turned to the world of pure art. Benjamin began his theory of art with the diagnosis made by Paul Valéry about the contemporary art situation. It is significant that his theory of art ended with a reference to Stéphane Mallarmé, Valéry’s literary teacher. Benjamin regarded Mallarmé as the first poet of pure art in the genre of poetry. Mallarmé and Valéry recognized that photography had been leading a revolutionary change of the art infrastructure in the age of mechanical reproduction. They chose to save artistry by assisting poetry to escape as far from the material world as possible. Painting and poetry were not the only genres which felt the crisis of the advent of photography. As Yves Bonnefoy, a French art critic and poet pointed out, photography gave the novel a sense of crisis while developing the street as the main stage of the novel as Eugène Atget did. Besides, at that time, both photography and the novel were monochrome — the latter in its stubborn naturalism (cf. Yves Bonnefoy, Poésie et Photographie, Galilée, 2014). ​ Even after the advent of photography, however, neither painting nor poetry nor the novel disappeared. As Anna Conway puts it, it’s not going to happen like that. (2013) As it has done so far, photography will coexist with painting, poetry, and the novel, creating its own space. Seeing Kim Woo Young’s ‘Soswaewon Ⅳ’ 2016, such ideas are embodied in reality. In that work, photography exists in a complex way, embracing painting, poetry and the novel. Now I would like to return to the first question, “What is photography?” after roaming around the previous question about the relationship between photography and poetry. At least, to the photographer, Kim, photography is poetic feelings or poetic remarks and a light in which to hold poetry. In one corner of his studio (where a safe used to be placed) in Chonggae, which was once a bank, the light lies on the floor with a slight lean. The landscape surrounded by monochrome lights with drizzles of golden lights is the world of his continuous and current photography. ​ _