Boomoon

BOOMOON is a photographer living and work in Seoul, Korea. He became interested in photography in the early 1970s and quickly abandoned painting. His early work is primarily street photography. Dark cityscapes imbued with uncertain anxiety and irony aroused adverse reactions. Labeled by the media as “a heretic of Korean photography,” Boomoon took such criticism merely as encouragement to continue photographing. In the 1970s, Boomoon recorded the rapid transformation of Korean society: capturing villages falling into extinction and the contrasts between urban and rural communities.

By the 1980s, he shifted to landscape photography as a means of self-reflection, creating large-scale images of sea, sky, and desert, void of human presence. Boomoon’s primary concern remains with experiencing the infinity of nature and the representation of its presence. For him, photography is a method and the conclusion of his landscape experience: “When I’m in the field, the image itself decides what moment I am waiting for. Waiting is part of the encounter. Some might think that it’s just by luck that all the elements come together to reveal the object to be photographed. But the image really is the culminating point in my complex experience of relationships with the world before me. I’m always amazed that it is possible to obtain an image in the fleeting second of an encounter between several physical and mental worlds. The moment when the shutter opens and closes is the conclusion of a situation.”

Adapted from BOOMOON.com

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