Pictures of Happenstance
Note: this is an article I wrote for a small photography exhibition that I held at the art gallery Museo in Anaheim, California. To see the photos referenced in this article you can go to the photography page of this site or click here.
I’ve always found myself ending up in all sorts of places and situations. I didn't necessarily decide to be there. With that in mind, I’m not entirely passive either-- I exist somewhere in the grey area between apathy and authoritarianism. I make partial decisions, but often life seems to finish those decisions for me. I don’t necessarily have a problem living this way because it has resulted in me living a somewhat unusual life at times, and I like that. Although at this point, I don’t know if anyone can really define a “normal life”. A better way to put it might be that I sometimes live unintentionally.
My photography is directly connected to this bizarre brain of mine, and as such, these photos are very unintentional. These photos, just like many of the moments I’ve experienced, are happenstantial. I ended up in some very cool places at very peculiar times. The culmination of this being when I studied documentary filmmaking in South Korea-- a somewhat spur of the moment idea in the first place-- and assisted in filming a political documentary right when the president was impeached. The photos of massive crowds in Korea were taken the day she was impeached, and I soon found myself in the middle of dozens of thousands of protestors celebrating the long-awaited decision. I’m still at a loss for words when it comes to describing how I felt at that moment, but for now I can only call it mystical. I could never have planned or predicted such an experience; luckily, I was equipped with a camera.
While there is undeniable beauty in a controlled artistic setting, there is an equal but vastly different beauty in the loose madness of art made with little forethought or pure instinct, such as street and nature photography. It’s the difference between narrative filmmaking and documentaries. When we lose control of our surroundings, our creative product becomes something vastly unique because we never could have predicted or planned the outcome.
Understanding that these photos are mostly unintentional, I hope you are still able to take meaning from them. While I’ve taken hundreds of photos, these are the ones that I feel have the most to say. What I take pride in with these photos is that they each say something despite the fact that I wasn’t trying to force them to be anything at all. In fact, in many of these cases, I wasn’t even sure if they would turn out because I was shooting on film-- and at the time, I had no idea how to shoot 35mm (and maybe I still don’t).
Most importantly, I sincerely hope that these photos provide an honest cultural depiction that can be observed and gained from. In this sense, both the artist and the viewer are sharing the same experience. Through taking and revisiting these pictures, I genuinely feel that I learned more than I could ever have imagined, and when I take into account that these were taken three to four years ago, I realize that these experiences have shaped me into who I am today.
– 3/5/2020 –
