Week 51: Yoon Kim

The rotating gallery features the work of an emerging photographer as well as an interview with him/her, and will change every Wednesday. The gallery is based off ‘collective curatorship’, where the photographer from week 1 chooses and interviews a photographer for week 2, week 2 chooses/interviews week 3, etc. There is only one stipulation to the process: Next weeks photographer has to be someone he/she has not had direct contact with yet. Ideally, this will take the gallery on a linked tour around the Internet, and exploring and unearthing new photographers as it goes.

This week, Molly Smith interviews Yoon Kim.

Molly Smith: We were just introduced through people from our hometown, Huntsville, Alabama, and it ends up we live a block away from each other in Brooklyn, New York. Even more eerie, we both have websites where we post a new picture every day. The result of those coincidences is that we have photographed a lot of the same places around our neighborhood. I get the sense that you always have your camera with you.

Yoon Kim: Yes, I do. I carry it around with me pretty much all of the time. There are lots of days I don’t even pull it out, but I take it to work and then I take it out with me to lunch and most of the time I don’t pull it out but sometimes there is something that will catch my eye and I don’t want to miss it.

MS: I was curious how long the moments are when you are shooting.

YK: It’s really quick actually.

MS: Yea, but there is something about the sharp quality and the still moment that gives a sense that some might even be shot with a tripod.

YK: No, none of them are.

MS: But sometimes it feels that the moment is extended. I love this one…

YK: Yes, there are two self-portraits.

MS: Oh, that is you, I wondered and thought it might be.

YK: I took that picture though. Since I am trying to shoot and have a picture for every day, sometimes there are days when at the end of the day I don’t have anything. So when I was taking off my sweater I wondered what it would look like.

MS: It seems like you go to very different places every day.

YK: I have a slightly busy social life, so l am lucky that I do.

MS: Did you always take pictures?

YK: No, I took a photography class in college, black and white, manual camera, and darkroom and since then I really haven’t.

MS: Did being in New York make you want to take pictures?

YK: It was a weird time for me in photography. I learned analog and then digital started coming out in point and shoot and I didn’t want to use point and shoot, so I didn’t do much with photography.

MS: Do you look at photography or something else for ways of seeing?

YK: All the time, even when I wasn’t taking photographs I loved the power of an image, so even when I wasn’t shooting I would spend time looking at websites and images, and now I do it all the time.

MS: How does the daily photograph work in your life, is it a goal for every day, or is it overbearing to have to take?

YK: At first it was really exciting, and now the initial excitement has worn off but now I notice that my observation of everything is slightly changed. I am looking at things and cropping them in my mind and seeing if there is anything visually interesting that I might photograph. There might be images that I walk by every day and I know that there is something there but I can’t quite figure it out, like the two scooters there…but I would walk by that every day, every morning and I knew there was an image and I tried different angles but I just couldn’t get it. And then one day I came home really late, that shot was taken around 5 am, I was drunk and I stopped and I thought right there and thought this is it!

MS: It’s difficult with the iconic architecture of the Brooklyn Museum behind it, but I don’t focus on it.

YK: Yea, I didn’t like it being right there, but it was unavoidable.

MS: I think you have a nice way of framing and including things that would bother me, but you include them and make them part of your aesthetic. This one for example, there are a lot of beautiful things in the image, the light, reflection, record of the time but there are also many pedestrian things, those cabinets and the spice rack, that are there but I don’t focus on them the way you have captured this scene.

YK: I have kind of evolved as a photographer by looking at other photography and trusting my instincts. I have an intellectual idea of what a photograph should be and all my life I’ve been attracted to lines and grids and spaces and my usual way of shooting is like this straight on, not at an angle but straight ahead. This is at a friend’s house and he actually had a really interesting bathroom and I took all these photos of the bathroom. But something attracted me to the stove, so I just took a couple of shots and when I looked at it I knew that was it. I just let my feelings take control of what to do and try to get outside of the perfect frame shot…I do that a lot and then when I think back on it later I think oooh, I’m controlling myself too much and I need to just let go because I remember there was some image in the corner that I wanted to crop and I tried real hard but then I realize later that photography isn’t just about you trying to make the photograph but it’s about capturing what’s there and letting it have its own life instead of you forcing a life out of it. But this one here, this is actually an example of something just straight on but all its elements make it beautiful even though it’s just a very ordinary or plain thing. I just trusted my instincts on that one.

MS: It’s interesting that you brought up the grid, but there is a sense of rapidity or the fleeting moment that quite often that breaks up that grid…

YK: Yes but I mean that it’s my default, lines on the street and like when I’m walking I skip over lines.

MS: Yes, I do that too. Sidewalks are crazy framing elements.

YK: Exactly, so naturally when I see something I see lines through it and I try to match up the image, and that’s fine but then as I take more pictures I realize there is so much more outside the grid and outside of those lines and I’m trying to capture that. I post ones that I slightly question. The ones that I quickly think “oh that’s great” I think about harder and then I’ll end up going back and posting something that in my gut I know is probably better, but I can’t emotionally or intellectually justify it, I just know that it’s better than the first one I thought of. I end up posting those, the ones I can’t quite defend.

MS: That seems like a good result of the daily photos…that question…

YK: Yea, I am challenging my own idea of what a good picture might be.

MS: When I saw this picture I thought “I wish I’d taken this photograph”, that I’d been wherever you were and seen that the way you did.

YK: That’s from the penthouse of Cooper Square Hotel. There’s a balcony that wraps all the way around the building and there are the more typical New York views of skyscrapers but I was so attracted to the tenement buildings of the East Village. I didn’t post this until a couple days later because the hard thing about shooting in the city is you can’t avoid the city. And so many shots end up looking like the stereotypical urban photograph so there are things I avoid…

MS: I think of you as documenting Brooklyn, and your attraction to the tenements in the city feels more like Brooklyn than Manhattan. Do you go on walks specifically to find images?

YK: I do, usually I’ll have a specific image in mind and I’ll shoot and be disappointed but while I’m there I’ll find another image to shoot. I was also frustrated in the beginning, because the only time I had to shoot was at night, but now when I shoot in the day I am less satisfied. I really like the orange light from streetlamps.

MS: Yes, it’s amazing on trees, I think.

YK: Especially the gingko trees.

MS: Like in this one!

YK: Yea they look like they are underwater.

MS: Do you go back to places where you have seen something you want to photograph?

YK: Yes, like the other weekend I went to Red Hook to photograph a building behind the baseball fields. The exterior is made up of convex curves that wrap around the entire building and it’s dirty and rustic, really a beautiful building but I couldn’t get close enough to get great shots and I was kind of disappointed. But then I found this to photograph when I walked around. A lot of times I’ll actually take pictures while I’m
driving.

YK: There is one here when it was raining really hard so I stopped and took the picture from the car and then there’s this other one I took from the highway, driving 65 miles and taking snapshots.

YK: There are so many times I wish I was invisible and I could just go anywhere I want to because I want to take a picture of this person because they are so interesting or I want to go into this establishment because it looks so cool but it takes a certain personality type to go in there and say “Hi, I’m a photographer and I want to take a picture of you”. Many times people stop me or get in my face and ask what I’m doing. I think it’s a big component of photography. Some photographers have access to a world I don’t have access to.

MS: It’s interesting to hear you say you want to get in that position because I feel like something would be lost when that moment was shared and confrontational.

YK: Yea, that’s why I sometimes wish I were invisible, because as soon as I take out my camera I either get reactions of people interested or upset and it ruins the moment and I can’t take the picture. If I was invisible I could capture the moment without anyone knowing.