A Vulgar Photographer 2024.01.07
Taking a picture means choosing reality. What to look at? What do I choose not to see? There are a myriad number of choices before me. Some turn to the beautiful sights of Times Square. Others will pose in front of skyscrapers to make their Instagram more glamorous. There will be beautiful images of New York City recorded there.
I simply chose differently. This is a story I saw on the streets of New York City, a theater full of madness, with no audience.
Photographers are beginning to lose their privileged status. In the country where I was born, there was a major earthquake on this first day of 2024, but it was ordinary people with smart phones who documented it. In that sense, we, the creatures we call photographers, have already received our death sentence.
We ugly photographers are still struggling to place ourselves in the privileged position of photographers. Unfortunately, the more perfectly composed a photograph is, the more beautiful it is, the more it corrupts into banality. After learning various literacies from all kinds of images, the imperfect and unstable ones are the only way we can perceive reality as real.
Beauty and misery are, in my opinion, the two axises that can greatly affect the human spirit. The misery of this world - it is an undeniable fact that it fascinates photographers. Just look at your own feet. There is misery swirling around you. We are already surrounded by misery without going to the trouble of traveling far to war zones. I turned my attention to that misery. That is the fundamental vulgarity of a photographer - the act of exploiting the misery of others. I do not deny my own vulgarity as a photographer. Because I believe it is my mission as a photographer to accept my own vulgarity and record the misery and sometime, joy of the world. The people photographed here need to be recorded in history as witnesses of this era. To be honest, I am not interested in what people in 2024 think of my photographs. What I am interested in is whether or not, 100 or 200 years from now, the people of the early 21st century will be able to leave their images towards future generations.