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Second Place Winner: Goseong Choi |
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Goseong Choi Statement: Umma, Korean for “Mom,” is a recent series of photographs witnessing a dramatic family event, my grandmother’s passing. When I was in Korea photographing in January, I was taking intimate domestic pictures of my family in their daily lives. Then I went to a small village where my father was from and was photographing the rural life there when I got word that my grandmother had had a stroke. She was in a coma for three weeks, and at the end of the third week, she died. She is my mother’s mother, and during the funeral and its anticipation and aftermath, I was particularly aware of my mother’s grief and emotion. I felt her deep sorrow and fear. And I photographed the sense of loss. The work that I had already been doing about her daily routine prepared us both for my role as a photographer during this momentous time. Photographing people’s lives with an ever-increasing sense of intimacy has been a tendency in still photography since the 1950’s. Robert Frank’s sweeping project The Americans looked at stranger’s lives but was infused with an intimate psychological mood and atmosphere in each situation. After that, photographers like Emmet Gowin, Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Araki, and Richard Billingham photographed their personal worlds as insiders, with glimpses of their own lives and their family and friend’s lives that were sometimes startlingly raw and revealing. Building on that tradition, I have evolved from making photographs that found a poetic rhythm in external views of cityscape and countryside to a more cinematic perspective on the circumstances of my own context of intimacy and family. Bio: I was born in Korea in 1984 and currently live and work in New York. I take photographs of my current circumstances in intimate domestic contexts. I care about the subtlety which can lie hidden in the quotidian routine of daily life, and part of my technique is to look for reflections and projections of emotion within the everyday. Sometimes the appearance of simplicity in truth hides enormous depths. Also, I frame images out of casual subjects by using my unique personal perspective and by observing the relationship between things in space. Umma, the latest series of my work, is about the sense of loss that my mother felt when her mother passed away. Artist’s Website |
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