Photographic sensibility exists in all photography, but contemporary photographers pursue a different sensibility from before, one that escapes from earlier esthetics.  Photography before, in line with modernist traditions, tried to stay faithful to the formalistic esthetic order of the elements in the screen, such as plastic composition, adequate color, and emotional moderation.  From the 1980’s onwards, photography starts to be recognized as art, but the important elements were the printing process, the stable tone and colors, and the mastery of the photographic details which amateur photographers could not emulate.  Photographers in the 1980’s with modernist tendencies strove to raise the artistic level of their work by capturing the subtle differences in tone and the details – which cannot be captured with today’s digital photographic process – and arranging the elements of the senses in a harmonious way.  On the other hand, contemporary photographers, although still preoccupied with perfecting the artistic level of their photographs, create a new order of the senses.  Photography contains different layers of sensibilities that cannot be expressed through painting.  Contemporary photographers seek to capture such sensibilities, and use the medium of photography in a strategic way.  In today’s multi-layered society, photography is becoming a medium which represents reality in a dynamic way.  Representation here does not mean passively transmitting a prepared object, but articulating the process whereby, the gaze through the camera, the image of the object, and discourses are intertwined.  In this moment where photography is considered as art as a matter of course, it is necessary to review once again the representation of the photographic medium.

Photography is also related to knowledge whose form is undergoing changes since postmodernism. Whereas knowledge in the past focused on positive learning, knowledge today is being expanded and opened to include even the way we deal with life, the way we act, and the way we express beauty.  It is no longer a knowledge trapped within the boundaries of what is provable, but a comprehensive one which includes the narrative and the senses that modernity and modernism had excluded.  Contemporary photographers form and maintain links with knowledge in diverse fields and disciplines in addition to that of photography itself, and are creating at the same time a new form of knowledge that is connected to the senses, a “sensitized knowledge”.  They try to link their objects to knowledge, and to understand photography in an intertextual way, by reading the many layers of texts that exist among photography, society, culture, politics, and history.  In this sense, contemporary photography takes interest in cultural phenomena, and seeks to stimulate diverse discourses through interdisciplinary research.

Korean contemporary photographers are also attempting to “knowlege-fy” the photographic sensibility.  Photography reproduces and accumulates knowledge in relation to other knowledge, but it itself can also become a knowledge.  Photographers in the previous generation tried to find “Korean beauty” through an anthropological or folkloristic approach.  They may have been quasi-anthropologists or quasi-folklorists themselves, but they failed to shake off their illusions and to assume an objective attitude, and attempted to coincide the gaze of the camera with that of an omniscient artist.  However, gazes in photography are not simple.  Even among Koreans, the level of bonding differs depending on their personal disposition including age, gender, social and educational backgrounds.  Sometimes, there are cases where people fail completely to identify with each other.  What is implicitly agreed in society is transformed and accepted differently as society changes.  As a result, what Korean contemporary photographers deal with is not historicity or tradition but the “phenomena of the present” and the “mechanisms of the present society.”

39(2) is a Korean contemporary photography exhibition which proposes the works of five photographers who each approach the deep-rooted militaristic culture and remnants of war in Korea in a different way.  The five photographers – Gyoo Sik Kim, NOH Suntag, Seung Woo Back, Young Hoon Lee, and Jae Hong Jeon – strategically utilize the medium of photography, and capture in their own style and viewpoint the militaristic culture and remnants of war permeating everyday life in Korea.  The artists transform social phenomena, which are changing with the times or with the diverse social groups, into visual images, and in the process, use photography in a strategic way.  The many techniques, including straight black and white photography, snap shots, and borrowing images from magazines and the mass media and transforming them digitally, are used to reveal the contexts that the images contain.  The strategic use of the specificities of the medium of photography is what sets contemporary photography apart from earlier photography.

Gyoo Sik Kim’s double-faced attitude toward the objects of his photography can be seen even in his use of actual weapon names as titles to his images of toy weapons.  The design of the diverse toy weapons alone show the ultimate in plastic beauty made only possible through state-of-the-art technologies, and is enough to make one forget the cruelty and violence inherent in the weapons. The imitation weapons captured through the micro-lens of Gyoo Sik Kim are depicted in soft tones and contrasts.  The toy weapons shed their crude plastic nature, and are reborn in photographic beauty, and the gelatin silver photography-looking digital prints confuse the sight of the viewers.  The culture of war games and toy weapons enjoyed by both children and adults penetrate our everyday lives without meeting any resistance, like the photographic images of Gyoo Sik Kim.

Air shows feature the world’s aircraft and promote the weapons produced by the armaments industry in Korea and abroad, and offer the chance to see the cutting-edge weapons first-hand, carrying such fear-inspiring names as next-generation fighter planes F-15K and KF-16, the Navy’s sub-spotting plane P-3C, next-generation infantry combat armored vehicles, K-9 self-propelled artillery, and K-21 tank.  Mothers seat their children on the ejection seats for “educational” photos, fathers shoot photos of their children pointing their gun at his father who is holding a camera.  It would be a frightening scene in real life, but in everyday life, it is a just another family photo during a pleasant family outing.  However, NOH Suntag’s “reallyGood, murder” contains a tension that breaks down the extremities.  The artist focuses out the crowd cheering at the fighter planes and reduces them to mere silhouettes, making them into powerless existences, and only highlights the small but vivid attack bombers as the object of his photos.  He also hides the faces of those posing proudly in front of the camera, thereby suspending a shadow of death over them.  The good, murdering weapon is the camera, and at the same time, chases after the camera like an anti-aircraft missile.

In 2002, when Seung Woo Back visited North Korea for the first time, he took snap shots of the city of Pyongyang while under the surveillance and control of the accompanying guards.  He was only able to shoot limited areas, and even had his films censored, but the camera had captured parts that even the artist and the North Korean security agents had failed to see.  “Blow Up” is about the domain of photography which is beyond all control, and about the “in-between” that even social systems and political surveillance cannot restrain.  It is the domain that exists “beyond”, which divides good and evil, harmony and conflict, and reality and imagination.  When Seung Woo Back visited North Korea at that time, he heard the North Korean children repeating three same things:  “We welcome your visit to the Democratic People’s Republic of Joseon”, “We are happy”, and “Only we can defeat the Americans”.  But what was being trained and controlled were not only the children of North Korea.  The promotional photos made by North Korea in the 1970’s that the artist stumbled on in a small bookstore in Tokyo were also politically controlled and artificially manipulated.  Just as original copies do not exist in photography, Seung Woo Back shows in “Utopia” our attempts to attain, by means of transforming and manipulating, our utopian illusions.  Seung Woo Back mocks at the utopian illusions that society has created by adding photographic manipulations to the images he shot in the controlled society of North Korea.  In the end, Seung Woo Back’s “Utopia” exists only as an elusive image that is beautiful on the surface but unattainable.

A sense of mission to find social contradictions by disclosing Korea’s militaristic culture, or a strong sense of professionalism, as a documentary photographer, to portray the other side of Korean society:  That has never been the motivation of Young Hoon Lee who took photos of a reserve forces training grounds.  What he wishes to do is to catch the momentary sensibility that only cameras are able to capture.  The artist does not translate objects into images; he translates the subtle experiences of the senses through the medium of these objects.  The Agfa Isolette 120 that Young Hoon Lee used is a medium-sized folder camera that is not only easy to sneak into an army base, but also a good choice to offset the reality of the particularity of the space that he chose to photograph.  Only some parts of the image are in focus, with the rest more or less out of focus.  As a result, Young Hoon Lee’s photos capture a different aspect of the space that the naked eye cannot see.  The slack sense of military discipline is seized by Young Hoon Lee’s camera shutter, and represented through loose images.   

Since 1997 Jae Hong Jeon has been taking photos and documenting the modern architectures that remain from the Japanese occupation period in the Jeolla and Chungcheong Provinces and has accumulated enough knowledge and experience to gain the reputation of being a specialist in the field.  As can be seen in his doctoral thesis titled “A Study on the Effects of Rice-related Facilities on the Change of Cityscape: Based on the Photo Studies of the Nonsan and Honam Plains in the Japanese Imperialism Era”, the photographer does not simply document images, but produces a knowledge of images through the collaboration with other fields and disciplines such as sociology and architecture.  He stubbornly keeps to analogue techniques for his photography, in line with his spirit of academic research.  Among his large archive of photos and documents of diverse architectures from the period of the Japanese occupation – which include production, transportation, logistics, public, and commercial facilities – he has selected photos of the architectures that represent the colonialist rule and power of the era, such as the residence of a Japanese landlord, banks, Shinto shrines, social gathering halls, and the cultural and social buildings that served as the seat of government organizations.  Through his photos, Jae Hong Jeon presents these modern architectures whose functions have changed today and are being used by the local residents in their everyday lives, thereby giving visual form to these objects whose meaning has changed over time.  Furthermore, the artist’s efforts over the past 10 years to research, document, and classify his field of interest makes one reflect on the connection between photography and knowledge, and proposes an attitude of the photographer as a specialized scholar. 

Images of war and the military, which up to recently had been considered only as political or social issues, are now being received differently in the daily lives of today’s diverse social groups.  The images, which for political propaganda or as remnants of colonialism, were linked to blind obedience or absolute trust and sacrifice before, take on the forms of magazines, toys, fashion, architecture, and commercial events in today’s reality, intervening in our everyday lives and showing different aspects in our capitalistic society.  Using the medium of photography, the five artists, to start with the way they incorporate their objects into their images, express our society’s ironies and riddles in their own way.  As a result, the photographic objects of their works are overshadowed not only by the composition of the photos themselves but also by the ideologies, capitalism and culture, and the products and commercialism of our society.  Also each from his own different perspective, they gaze at the particular reality of Korea that can be found in our everyday lives, and do not stop at creating fragmentary images, but advance the photographic image into the dimension of knowledge on a long-term project basis.  As a result, photography is starting to be recognized not as a mere medium to convey information or to record, or to propose plastic beauty, but as a “knowledge system of the senses” that explores and reflects on its objects.