Jehsong BAAK
Born 1967, Junju, South Korea
American, lives and works in Paris

The photographs by Jehsong Baak capture the transcendental visual experiences ingrained in everyday life. A loose chronicle of the artist’s mostly nocturnal wanderings in Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Chicago, New York and elsewhere, his pictures offer occasional glimpses to points beyond the purely visible and identifiable. While grounded in the here and now, they nonetheless peer into the interstices that open to more mystical realms. Like the films of Federico Fellini – whose office at Cinecittà in Rome he photographed as part of a private pilgrimage – Baak’s photographs glance at ordinary incidents, whether absurd or merely prosaic, with an eye for both eccentric detail and universal truth. Infused with simple rituals and a carnivalesque spirit, they interrogate momentary dislocations and happenstance coincidences. A woman crossing Piazza Venezia in the rain under her umbrella, for example, emerges from the inky darkness sanctified by a globe of light radiating from her midsection.

Like a medium, Baak divines the essence of a particular spot, as in the surreal spirit of a desolate courtyard in Philadelphia. In the ominous glare of a streetlight, plastic reindeer perch incongruously from a brick wall above the elongated shadow in the shape of a woman’s leg encased in a knee-length leather boot. An empty park bench awaits passersby guarded by the eerie outline of a male figure wearing a bowler reminiscent of a figure from a Magritte painting. Snapshots by a sensitive and perpetual traveler separated from his birthplace and much of his family at a young age, Baak conveys alienation or, conversely, a keen sense of place, often simultaneously.

His imagery is at once oddly detached, consistent with his lack of national affiliation, and fiercely in tune with his environment. Peopled by a network of friends, some of whom stand in as surrogate self-portraits of the artist, Baak’s oeuvre constitutes a creative constellation conceived in exile that mourns the loss of, but also transcends, national identity. Baak counts among his most important artistic influences Robert Frank and Joseph Koudelka, and their respective visual explorations of rootlessness. In the tradition of their compelling portraits of adopted homelands and peripatetic peoples, Baak’s visual ballad mines the territory originally staked out by their soul-baring, lyrical and often devastating images. It is thus fitting that the photographs in Baak’s book, Là ou Ailleurs, were chosen by legendary photography curator and publisher Robert Delpire, who has played such an important role in the careers of both Frank and Koudelka.

Baak’s childhood and adolescence were as itinerant as the route traced by his images. He left Korea at the age of nine, following his father to North Carolina, Alabama and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. After studying Architecture briefly at the University of Michigan, Baak moved to New York at the age of nineteen and rededicated himself to photography, having taken it up initially two years before. He consecrated himself entirely to the discipline when he moved to Paris at the age of thirty, where he has lived since 1998. Since then, he has been featured in one-man shows at Stichting Noorderlicht in Groningen, Holland (2001), at Galerie Vu in Paris (2002), at Daniel Miller Gallery, in Los Angeles (2006), and at Galerie Nikki Diana Marquardt, in Paris (2006). In the fall of 2007, his work will be the focus of a show at Holland Urban Photography Gallery in Amsterdam.

His work is represented in several important private collections in the United States and Europe.

Peter Benson Miller
Paris, September 2007