Pictures
Commission from Mendes Gans of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Even when making pictures on his own doorstep, Jehsong Baak is what you might call a traveling photographer. Not that it is unusual for a photographer to travel. For most however it is nothing but a practical means to an even practical end. Photograph architecture? Go out and find buildings. Photograph landscapes? Find a horizon.
For the traveling photographer means and end coincide. When traveling, he already is where he wants to be (although usually hard pressed to state his destination precisely). And once arrived, he’s still traveling - mentally if not physically, for every destination is really nothing but a stop on the way.
Everything is worth the consideration of the traveling photographers inspective gaze. Everywhere. Anytime. Which probably explains why most of them are unable to discern life and photography. Each exists by the grace of the other.
There is a wide variety of traveling photographers (most likely as wide the variety of characters committed to it) but two ‘sub-species’ can be distinguished. There are those who venture into the world to see what is out there and there are those who go out to find what is inside themselves.
Jehsong Baak definitely belongs to the latter. If his pictures are descriptive, they are as descriptive of the world as they are of himself. This is what caught my eye, they state. This is what touched me somehow. In this respect each and every one of his pictures is a self-portrait.
His doorstep seems to have always been moving. He was born in Junju, South Korea in 1967. He crossed his first ocean at age 9 when immigrating to the United States with his father and his family. Twenty years later he crossed his second ocean, this time on his own and heading for Paris.
As usual though, it is the smaller steps that turn out to be the decisive ones. The corners you take without noticing, the side streets that suddenly appear, the bridges you cross without thinking just to find you’ve found something. Or haven’t of course, for surprises come in all sorts. As he knows only too well. Even before moving to the US he got separated from his biological mother. It would take 25 years before he would meet her again -- a moment that would offer him the insight that you can never un-ring a bell. Time cannot be relived, whatever corners you take or bridges you cross.
As for his first ocean crossing: imagine waking up in the morning, a stranger in a strange land. Imagine that morning repeating itself, day after day, year after year, in North Carolina, during a stint in Birmingham, Alabama, and ultimately in a suburb of Washington DC where the Baaks finally settled in “a vast landscape of banality and boredom, the mall with a cineplex representing the summit of culture”, as he would later recall.
Out of place, out of sync. He picked up photography at age 17 when in high school, figuring working for the school paper was good for meeting people and covering the occasional silly school game, a great way to skip classes. Was it? Years later he rephrased it somewhat: “Some people learn to play the guitar or act in the school play in order to escape, and to experience intensity and magic; mine was taking pictures.”
Of course one can take a corner for more reasons than one. (Deep down he had always known the reason to be another one entirely. For years he hadn’t owned a photograph of his mother. Her image had long been a mystery to him.)
Once he had bought his first camera he was hooked, spending most of his time in the school’s darkroom. Aged 19 he moved to New York, eager for The Real Thing. He worked as a photographer's assistant for a while, scrounged a few magazine assignments, participated in a group show -- a corner, a side street, a bridge -- just to find that somehow none of it seemed to work out.
For seven years he gave up on photography entirely. Later he became convinced that it was the story about the pearls that kept him on track. He learned it from the artist Jon Rush, his drawings professor at the University of Michigan where he had sidetracked himself briefly by thinking he had to study architecture. Rush told him how oysters need salt in order to survive, but that it’s painful when salt comes in contact with their flesh. The suffering oyster produces a fluid to cope with the pain and the fluid and salt mixed together produces a pearl. “Whenever I was drowning in self-pity and sadness, Rush told me to go out there and make my own pearls.”
Returning to Korea and tracing his biological mother in 1997 finally cleared his mind. Coming back he had regained his ability to photograph. A few months later he moved to Paris, knowing that becoming a stranger once again would sharpen his senses. He didn’t even speak the language.
He found a tiny maid’s room which cost him a small fortune, was mostly broke and got by on odd jobs. Frequently insomniac, he got used to roaming the streets for hours, just taking pictures. Again and again he saw a black and white city, infinitely more intense than it’s grayishly colored daytime counterpart.
Slowly a vision emerged: dark, never for its own sake but as backdrop for the light that was always there: tender, guiding, hopeful, comforting. Part of this same vision was his constant use of reflections and shadows: mysterious layers indicating other lives and possibilities, corners to be taken and bridges to be crossed.
Be they taken in Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Chicago, Seoul, Philadelphia, Washington, Toulouse, Barcelona, Marseille, Los Angeles, Groningen or Amsterdam - they’re always made on his doorstep, close to his heart.
Eddie Marsman
Groningen, Holland July 2008
Eddie Marsman is a photography critic, writer and curator. In 2001 he curated Jehsong Baak's first ever solo exhibition which took place in a medieval chuch in the vicinity of Groningen as part of the Noorderlicht Photofestival. In 2005 he co-curated a commission on Schiermonnikoog, the smallest inhabited Dutch Wadden Sea island, in which Baak was one of the participants.
