Photography is the visual medium that is perhaps most constrained by the process through which it is created. Inexorably linked to this very method that allows it to exist, many contemporary photographers seek to undermine these principles, breaking the constraints of literal imagery in an attempt to transcend what can be seen into a realm of what is felt and known, but that could never be literally witnessed through human eyes.
In the work of both American photographer Chris McCaw and Korean born Atta Kim, what we think we see and know is openly challenged. By using light to their advantage, and bending and twisting it to their whims, these photographers remove images from the context that helped them to exist in the first place. In Kim’s DMZ series and the Sunburn series of McCaw, these artists have both made an open challenge to traditional notions of photography and image making. Ultimately Kim’s DMZ series is more compelling; it has stronger content and meaning, and he employs a more powerfully emotive and thought provoking technique that challenges intrinsic notions of not just photography, but life as a whole.
Science and art are very different in their approach and methods, but they often inform each other in some way. “The purpose of both science and art, in the modern sense, is to discover the reality that lies hidden behind, beneath or beyond appearances,” (Rexler, 78). To accomplish this in their own works, both McCaw and Kim remove a literal, immediately recognizable subject, transforming landscapes and city scenes into otherworldly stages that seem at once familiar and also distinctly alien.
Both photographers make images of landscapes that are in some way altered, and are not immediately recognizable for what they actually are, but do so in distinctly different ways. In his DMZ series, Atta Kim makes photographs with incredibly long exposure times of the Demilitarized border between Northern and Southern Korea. In what Kim is doing, the exposure time, usually being between four and eight hours, process is important. It is this method of photography that allows for the images he is making to carry more weight than simple pictures of a hostile place.
As with the work of Kim, the method and process are also important in the photographs made by Chris McCaw. In McCaw’s ongoing series Sunburns, he employs a process that involves the use of unique paper negatives to record his images of landscapes and cityscapes. In these images the sun is seen streaking across the sky above his chosen locations. The sun burns a streak into the photographic paper, solarizing the negative and converting it to a positive while marking the paper with a scar (Rexler, 184). McCaw’s process, however, strips the images of color, and leaves them feeling flat.[1]
The images he creates appear empty and remote. As though there is no life there to be found, these locations seem isolated, and as though they have been abandoned. This emptiness is initially intriguing, but ultimately seems lacking. There is not a lot of depth to explore, and the images feel almost too staged. The locations chosen do not have obvious personal meaning, and the reason for their selection remains a mystery to the viewer. This helps to undermine the strength of the images, and weaken the dialogue that can be created around them.
Kim’s images are just the opposite, with his DMZ series rife with meaning. Both moving and personal, Kim’s DMZ series was shot on various locations on the border between Northern and Southern Korea (Rexler, 185). Carefully chosen and constructed, Kim’s images seem subtly abstract at first, and more so as they unfold before the viewer.
“In the work of…Kim, the subject, or rather the very center of the photograph, where the classical subject should reside, has become…a blur” (Rexler, 185). Due to the long exposures, the only elements that register in camera are the stationary objects found within the landscape, and the landscape itself. The movement of forces through the Demilitarized zone, concentration of troops and all traffic disappear into a haze that is created over the course of the eight-hour long exposures, leaving empty landscapes and elements stripped of their purpose to look out into an empty world (Rexler, 185).
The presence of human life is at once confirmed and hidden by its very existence and movement; only stationary aspects of the landscape can burn themselves into the image. The long exposures capture hours of activity and life and meld them into a single instant. Though they appear stark and lifeless at first, it is only after a closer examination the one realizes that they are actually alive with activity.
To abstract images in these ways frees them of their literal associations. This is done as a means to reveal deeper truths about life and photography. These truths often seemed tied into Buddhist ideals, and a main one is “the notion that change, or transience, is the only concrete reality, and that time as a quantifiable, linear entity is a mirage. All time and no time are the same (Cotter).[2]
The way that time is compressed in Kim’s images of the DMZ in Korea make us question some of the notions of how time flows. Where McCaw’s images seem to stretch out time, elongating an exposure and showing the charted course of how and why, Kim’s images are less direct and more thought provoking. They make us see what happens over the course of many hours, and how that meaning is changed when all of that information is condensed and presented in a single frame. These images do not feel linear, but rather somehow cyclical and continuous.[3]
As a result of this, an interesting space is created within the frame of the photograph. With time being expanded and flattened the way it is, an emptiness and sort of eerie silence is created in these images. “’There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space…absence of sound leaves it quite pure and, in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless,’” (Bachelard, 43). As discussed before, the bustle of activity that actually exists in the DMZ is masked in Kim’s exposures by its very existence, which leads to a feeling that life is both present and totally absent in the same space.
Neither Kim’z series on the DMZ nor McCaw’s Sunburn images are just about literal subjects. The subjects that they choose are simply used as a means of conveying larger meaning and deeper truths that they want to share. Ultimately, Kim’s images prove to be more powerful and poignant, abstracting an image while also leaving portions of it intact. His methods, means and execution are all stronger, and in the end this produces a better example of the power of abstract photography than do McCaw’s images.
Bibliography
Atta Kim - ON-AIR Project, DMZ Series, Battlefield,The Western Front, Movie Still, 2003
70 3/4 x 90 1/2 inches, c-print.
Atta Kim, ON-AIR Project, DMZ Series, The Western Front, 4 Hours, 2003.
Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP#269(Pacific Ocean/Summer Solstice), 2008
2- 8”x10” unique gelatin silver paper negatives Private collection.
Chris McCaw, Sunburned GSP#366 (Nevada/Summer Solstice) 2009 unique gelatin silver paper negative 4 x 5 inches
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press books: Boston, 1994.
Cotter, Holland. Photography Review: In Atta Kim’s Long-Exposure Photographs, Real
Time Is the Most Surreal of All. 2006. New York Times. 12 July 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/arts/design/12atta.html
Hickey, Dave. The Invisible Dragon Revised and Expanded. The University of Chicago Press:
Chicago, 2009.
Rexler, Lyle. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. Distributed Art
Publishers: New York, 2009.
[1] Each image McCaw makes can be said to be truly unique, and should lend to the individuality of each image. The opposite ends up happening, however, with each image blending into the next with the focus shifting from meaningful content to the simple exploration of a technique.
[2] Kim is always very careful to make clear that he is in fact not a practicing Buddhist, but nevertheless, some ideas central to Buddhism can often be found in his work. This is particularly true of the DMZ series, with hours and hours being compressed into single instants.
[3] In these elongated exposures, the end result often feels less like a photograph and more like a performance. The photograph itself becomes a sort of performance art, with the performer being the very light that created the image. Stretching and bending our view of time, these images show us things our eyes could never see without their assistance. (Rexler, 12).
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