1.

The world may be thought of as a huge mass made up of countless translucent layers. We each live and die alone in our own thin little layer, widely separated from people living different lives around the world. Perhaps the notion of a shared existence is merely a figment of our imagination.

What divides us from others is not merely physical distance; we often seem to be living at entirely different speeds, in different times. Some people, citing the global triumph of democracy and the market economy, might believe that we are in the final stages of our historical development, but that seems like a distant future for many others. Across the globe, many people spend their lives in extreme poverty, or wear military fatigues and engage in guerrilla warfare in the mountains or desert.

For them, contemporary life remains a back-breaking, nightmarish ordeal, no different from life in the eighteenth or nineteenth century during the so-called ‘age of modernity’. For some people, time flies at the speed of light, while for others, time sluggishly slinks along at a snail’s pace, continually pausing to look back. People’s burning desire to move faster and their fear of getting left behind continues to produce more and more divergent times within the present. All these differing time trajectories overlap and interweave in complex ways to form the world of the ‘here and now’.

Our daily lives are as fragile as a cracked wine glass, ready to shatter into pieces at the slightest nudge. Nonetheless, even with horrific tragedies happening all the time in different parts of the world, we continue to go about our daily lives unfazed. We must repeat our daily routine—going to work or school just like the day before, and the day before that—and pretend that we cannot hear the screams and cries of pain beyond the wall.

Despite such isolation, we dare to speak of contemporaneity because we are now able to ‘see’ the outside world with fascination. One of the most important tasks assigned to photography since its inception has been to infiltrate and bring back images from the other layers of our fractured world. For some people, the world is bright, warm, and brilliant, but others live in a world of suffocating darkness. The bravest and boldest photographers—those with fire in their blood—relentlessly break into others’ time and space, allowing us to ‘see’ into their world. If it is possible for some of us to sacrifice a bit of our peaceful lives in order to help those in distress, then it is possible for photography—and photographers—to change the world.

Photographers who strive to connect the severed layers of the world and who use their cameras to help the weak oppose the mighty often develop a reputation of being rather proud, or even arrogant. We eagerly consume the legends of these heroic photographers and the tales of their fiery passion that the media delivers. Certainly, they do sometimes risk their lives, and they are often quite deserving of our praise and enthusiasm. And some of their photos have indeed changed the world. The subject of this article—Noh Suntag—can certainly be included among these fiery photographers. But despite the fact that Noh spends his life on the run, striving to stay ahead of the pack, he cannot help incessantly doubting himself and his photography.

 
2.
Noh Suntag (b. 1971) is the rare photographer who began his career as a journalist before transitioning to become an artist, whose ‘artworks’ can now be seen in renowned international museums and art biennales. Fate certainly had a hand in this, but that is not something he could have controlled.

About two years ago, one critic wrote that Noh ‘signifies the pinnacle of what Korean photography can achieve in its history’. Almost immediately thereafter, however, he took him off this pedestal in an article written just two months later. Looking back at that particular article, the words are quite lofty and verbose:

“The words of Jesus are the best source for contemplating the meaning of faith over the last 2000 years. Faith is the truth of one’s wishes, and the proof of what one cannot see. People often hope that their faith might lead them home, but many have died by following their belief. They may not receive the promise of their faith in this life, but they will find their home in heaven. Therefore, those with faith can never lose their way….People like Noh Suntag, however, who do not have faith and who constantly doubt, can never find their home. By trying to be both activist and artist, Noh will continue to be tormented, unable to give up either the political or the photographic. While some have crowned him as a “social-minded artist,” others point their finger and accuse him of using political images to sell his “art.” While some hands elevate him to artistic greatness, others throw him down to the ground. Noh Suntag is doomed to wander, never to find serenity. But of course, he is simply reaping what he himself has sown.”

As often the case with weak-minded critics, he must have given in to the reckless desire to capture the artist through his own grandiloquence. But now, two years later, nothing has changed, and it is time to pick up where those words left off. As seen in the photos of this exhibition, Noh remains as tenacious as ever in his photography. The world is still dark, with the sun hidden behind the clouds. Water drops from water cannons spread and sparkle like snowflakes, as Noh Suntag still takes his photos at a full sprint. The flashlight of his camera sporadically penetrates the darkness, uncovering people with bizarre expressions, who seem to be laughing and crying at the same time. When he elaborately arranges his photos on the walls of the museum, he seems to be categorizing specimens.

Nonetheless, despite the occasional trivial victory as an artist, Noh’s career as an activist has been marked by a seemingly endless series of setbacks. His front has been pushed back further and further, as Noh and his colleagues have been defeated in Maehyang-ri, Daechu-ri, Yongsan, and Gangjeong. In both politics and photography, the world two years ago is not much different from the world today. Perhaps that is why my vocabulary for discussing his work also has not changed. Can we truly make any progress? I have my doubts, but I will write as if my life depends on it.

 
3.
For this exhibition, Noh Suntag presents photos of people taking photos. His subjects come from various walks of life: Noh’s fellow photojournalists on the spot covering various news events; police taking photos of protesters as evidence; people taking commemorative photos; elderly people taking “selfies”; children playfully snapping pictures of someone lying in the street. The title of the series is Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence, hinting at the vast difference between the actual moment of taking a photo and the final image in the frame. For every ‘decisive moment’ that the audience passively observes within their comfortable surroundings, the photographer must peer through the lens while contorting his or her body into various awkward positions, extending an arm or lifting a leg.

More than any other photographer, Noh Suntag excels at extracting certain moments from the flow of time, so that we may perceive their inherent distortion and grotesqueness. One of Noh’s predecessors with a similar knack for capturing the bizarre moments hidden within everyday life in capitalist society was Martin Parr, who delivered unforgettable imagery by artfully distorting scenes of tourists taking photos in front of famous sites, such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Parthenon.

The photos of Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence may lack the instant gratification of Parr’s works, but that is because they cover a much wider span of time and space. Noh’s series consists of disparate shots taken throughout his career at many different sites and events. As such, they defy easy categorization with an obvious theme, and they lack the consistent aesthetic style of his other series (e.g., the strAnge ball, State of Emergency, and ReallyGood, Murder). However, what they lack in lucidity and concision is more than made up for by their expansive range and depth, which provoke more profound and rewarding reactions in the viewer.

Originally created for the series entitled Bird Guide, these photos represent the longest lasting works of Noh Suntag. Notably, he has re-titled the photos for this exhibition, but what is he trying to imply with this new title? Does he mean that the people taking the photos must crawl into every nook and cranny, with the flexibility and stealth of a snake? What can he possibly mean by conjuring images of serpentine people taking photos of one another? I cannot say for sure, and people with a lot on their minds are sure to reach different conclusions that are hard to communicate or comprehend. At any rate, I have never known another photographer who is constantly agonized over the act of photography as much as Noh Suntag. In order to better understand his work, we must first backtrack a little bit.

From the beginning of his career, Noh has been deeply concerned with investigating the act of photography. His ‘official’ career as a full-fledged artist began in the summer of 2004, when he presented an exhibition and book, both entitled Smells like the Division of Korean peninsula. His debut was not exactly a sensation, as the photos of this series were a motley mix. While Noh’s unique aesthetics and distinctive black humor were present in some of the photos, others remained stuck in the straightforward framing of media photography. The series of Smells like the Division of Korean peninsula certainly contains the DNA of the artist: political themes, a unique aesthetic sense, an obsession with ethics, and a working method of a photojournalist. All of these elements would be further developed to later reveal Noh Suntag the ‘artist’ who we would come to know in the future.

Noh Suntag had quit working as a photojournalist about three years prior to Smells like the Division of Korean peninsula, but the works of that series still look like those of a media photographer. The photos convey an intense criticism of reality, an obsession to understand the historical context of contemporary social phenomena, and a tenacious desire to expose social contradictions and enact social participation. Already, however, Noh seemed to feel a strange sense of incompatibility with his photography. Some doubts began to emerge within the photos, like the larva of Ammophila sabulosa infesta, a wasp that grows inside the body of a host. It was as if the photographer himself was openly questioning his own efforts: ‘There’s something awry with these photos. Can I really believe what I photographed?’

Then and now, Noh’s working method has always worked like a photojournalist. When taking his photos, he probably stands alongside other photojournalists without feeling out of place. Like all photojournalists, Noh ventures into areas where the social fabric is being torn by explosive problems and conflicts. The fingers that press the shutter on his camera are often trembling with rage. His photos are sent to the world directly from the night time streets of Seoul, where protests are being violently suppressed; from Daechu-ri, Pyeongtaek, where the residents were forcibly relocated due to the U.S. military; and from Gangjeong village, Jeju Province, where a gray-haired priest is forced to defend himself against combat police. Through Noh’s photos, we come to know what happened in these places; as such, his works fulfill a fundamental function of photojournalism.

However, Noh Suntag is unique as a photographer who constantly doubts the things that he photographs. He delves deeper into his subjects, even beyond doubt, to ask whether the viewers truly believe what he photographs. The distance between the fiery events captured by photojournalism and the cold doubts of photography is much further than we think. Constantly maintaining such incompatibilities within one mind and body must be extremely painful and difficult.

In fact, the identities of a ‘photojournalist’ and an ‘art photographer’ are quite different. Believing in the power of the camera, photojournalists are constantly rushing into the world of others without hesitation. But the dynamic photos of these fire-blooded photographers cannot immediately be considered as artworks. In the realm of art, only a real conservative still believes that photography is capable of directly representing the objective ‘truth’. Unlike photojournalists, art photographers are continually contemplating the limitations of the medium of photography. In other words, they inherently doubt the type of truth produced by photography. Thus, it is only by doubting his own photos and forcing the viewers to consider them more deeply that Noh Suntag the photojournalist becomes Noh Suntag the artist.

For two or three years after Smells like the division of Korean peninsula, Noh Suntag constantly spewed out photos, like the wild and violent spray of an unmanned fire hose. He produced vast quantities of work, including series such as Bird Guide and National Flag User Guide, and numerous other works that cannot be neatly tied together as one series. Moreover, it was during this period that Noh took many of the primary photos from several of his finest series, including The strAnge ball, State of Emergency, and Red House. All of these works ambiguously hover around the boundary between art photography and photojournalism.

Both The strAnge ball and State of Emergency focus on the unfortunate events that occurred in Daechu-ri, Pyeongtaek in 2005 and 2006. Following the prolonged negotiations between Korea and the United States, and ratification by the Korean National Assembly, some U.S. military bases were relocated to Daechu-ri. The residents who had lived in Daechu-ri for generations were evicted from their homes and farms overnight. Most of the residents were farmers who knew no other way of life, so they intensely resisted the seizure of their land. But they could do little to oppose the Ministry of Defense, which automatically dispensed compensation for the land through the court system and then put up wire fences around the seized properties.

The government came in with forklifts to uproot crops and throw the residents out. When the farmers resisted by tying bands around their heads, standing in lines to guard their land, they were labeled as ‘seditious’ to society due to their ‘frontal attack on governmental authority’. Since the Korean War, many of the residents’ had arduously struggled to create tiny patches of farmland by painstakingly digging out the flats, hauling and spreading fresh dirt, and removing the salt with their own hands. Through their long struggles, they had finally succeeded in turning the tidal flats into rich, arable land, so it was little surprise that they fought tooth and nail to hold onto it.

But their tiny, isolated resistance proved futile against the massive united front of the military and police. On May 4 and 5, 2006, soldiers and police swarmed into Daechu-ri and arrested 600 people. Unbelievably, to combat a handful of farmers armed with bamboo sticks, the government sent a fighting force that included more than ten Blackhawk helicopters. Hired mercenaries and a battalion of engineers attacked and demolished the village with forklifts and bulldozers.

Ironically, May 5th is National Children’s Day in Korea. While children in other parts of the country were gleefully smiling with presents, children in Daechu-ri watched helplessly as their fathers and uncles were brutally beaten. Such is the separation that divides our world. A month later, the whole incident was forgotten as our nation turned its eyes to the World Cup in Germany, enthusiastically cheering on the ‘Red Devils’ for the Korean team at the top of our lungs.

How would Noh Suntag choose to photograph this type of environment? If he was a straightforward documentary photographer, he would have taken photos of the abhorrent violence of the state, the impotent rage of the righteous farmers, and the tear-filled eyes and shocked expressions of the innocent mothers and children. Then we could have fully indulged in our anger, and perhaps shed tears of our own over the photos.

Of course, such straightforward documentary photos have always been part of Noh’s oeuvre. They were included in his past works, his present works, and will continue to be included in the future. However, most of the photos from The strAnge ball and State of Emergency do not evoke our empathy. They almost seem to be freeze-frames taken from the most bizarre scene of the darkest comedy. Images of explicit violence or tragedy rarely appear. In fact, it is not even clear who is the assailant and who is the victim.

Looking at these photos, we would have no idea what really happened in Daechu-ri. All we could see is grotesque, bleak scenery. In The strAnge ball, a round radar tower silently watches us from a distance, like the moon. In State of Emergency, combat police glitter and shine in the light, like a swarm of crustaceans. The farmers besieged and knocked down by the police look so distinct that the whole thing seems to have been theatrically staged.

For The strAnge ball, Noh Suntag took a ‘roundabout’ way. Hovering across the land, he took photos of the quiet countryside of Daechu-ri, always sure to include the ubiquitous ‘Radome’ (radar + dome) of the U.S. military. The resulting images are a distinctive mix of traditional Asian ink wash paintings, with a theatrical touch. With his wife and young daughter, Noh falsely registered as a resident in Daechu-ri and opened up a photo studio there.

As a social activist, Noh takes portraits of the elderly to be used as their funeral photo, and as a journalist, he trembles with rage while pounding out sentences filled with incendiary curses and criticism. Strangely though, once he gets a camera in his hands, he prefers a more ‘roundabout’ attitude. With his characteristic self-deprecating manner, he grumbles, ‘this is not the time to whine about the ball in Daechu-ri’. He makes excuses for his ‘roundabout’ way, saying, ‘The story of my photos begins with the white ball, but I hope it finds its way to the farmers of Daechu-ri, who had lived a tough life under the white ball’.

Maybe Noh Suntag felt distressed. Although these photos resemble conventional documentary photos, they are clearly meant to function in a completely different way. Documentary photographers are typically guided by two fundamental beliefs: that it is possible to capture the ‘truth’ through photographs, and that photographs have the power to inspire people to act. By carrying out these beliefs in reality, documentary photographers are practicing their own brand of ethics. They seek to invade the complacent minds of people who are comfortably ensconced in the narrow layers of their everyday lives. The ultimate ethical goal of such photographers is to arouse our anger by forcing us to look beyond our own peaceful lives and to unite against the disconnection of the world.

However, Noh Suntag’s ethics are much more complex and entangled, because they revolve in two different orbits. Like most photojournalists, he is ethically driven to document incendiary actions and events so that they can be seen by more people. Guided by these ethics, Noh routinely rushes to various sites and takes his camera directly into the conflict and the mud-flinging. At the same time, however, Noh feels the ethics of an artist who incessantly doubts his own actions and questions the limitations of photography as a medium.

Can photography record reality of life? Isn’t photography just another tool and excuse for remaining oblivious, causing us to remember only those fragmented scenes we see in captured photograph? Is it really possible to understand others’ lives simply by viewing photographs from our own safe perch? In truth, don’t people just want to be emotionally moved by images? Can you really believe what you see in a photograph?

These doubts are hopeless. Yet, they have not been resolved, and they never will be. It is this critical mind for probing the limitations of photography that makes Noh Suntag an artist, but that mind is constantly at odds with Noh Suntag the photojournalist. Indeed, it is this complex and even vicious ethical compulsion that makes Noh’s works so captivating. Overall, the work of artists who are driven by some ethical compulsion is generally more interesting than that of artists with no such compulsion. This distinction goes beyond ‘boring’ explanations such as the social responsibility of art or the artist’s duty to engage with society; it can be attributed more to the simple fact that the works of artists with an ethical compulsion are usually much more peculiar.

Ethics have a very powerful effect on works of art. If artists are completely immersed in some ethical pursuit, their works tend to be rather boring and fragmentary. But those artists who are driven in multiple directions by conflictive ethical compulsions, who refuse to give up on any of their beliefs, often create works that are bizarrely and often beautifully distorted.

The beauty in Noh Suntag’s photographs comes from such conflicted ethics. Despite the fact that he is addicted to photography, he simultaneously thinks that photography should not be believed. Accordingly, he tries to keep people from carelessly empathizing with his photos. Thus, he subverts the aesthetic sensibility of conventional documentary photography, which emphasizes our universal humanity and relies upon our ability to empathize with people whose lives are very different from our own. Of course, Noh does not want his photographs to serve as mere propaganda, subjugated to political and ethical purposes. After all, as an artist, he must continually produce new aesthetics and beauty.

Perhaps this is why Noh’s photographs of highly combustible sites have a beauty that can only be described as chilling. As the gravitational pull of his social ethics becomes stronger, he must overcompensate towards beauty in order to avoid being dragged along. For example, Noh’s photographs from the series, Namildang Design Olympic, which were taken at the actual site of a crisis where people’s lives were being threatened right before his eyes, have a desperate beauty, which is not present in his Oh Bu Ba series with images of parents and children. At the same time, however, the photos of Namildang Design Olympic are much more inconsistent. While some of them resonate with a transcendent, ominous beauty, others fail to escape the gravitational pull and are thus no more than ordinary journalistic photographs.

With his keen eye and sharp framing, Noh captures moments that reveal the awkward and ludicrous bare face of the state, with its violence and contradiction. This unsightly face is bared not only in news media, but also in museums. Repeatedly murmuring the same questions, the artist Noh Suntag finds himself on an endless treadmill. By now, every photographer is familiar with the writings of Susan Sontag and John Berger, so they must certainly reflect on whether photography is indeed ethical. But Noh seems particularly obsessed over this quandary. Most photographers are able to reach a prompt conclusion with regard to the ethics of photography. They either give up photography altogether, or become an “artist” who freely experiments with aesthetics and the limitations of the medium, and finally some become a documentary photographer who prioritizes the need to inform the world of suffering.

Once you have truly suffered from something, you cannot suffer from it again. Of course, throughout your life, your thoughts might return to the heated problems and questions that made you suffer, but they have already been settled. A minor fever at an early age serves as immunity against more serious fevers in the future. But Noh Suntag seems unable to get past his suffering. He seems to be in a constant state of fever as he takes his photographs. He is in a perpetual state of hesitation, hovering around the sites and shuttling back and forth between art photographer and documentary photographer. In the midst of such deep-rooted fever, the clichéd criticisms of documentary photography—‘If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough’—are merely empty words.

As mentioned above, I once wrote that Noh Suntag represents the pinnacle of what Korean photography can achieve in its history, and I still believe this to be true. There has never been a photographer like Noh Suntag, and there will never be another one like him. Indeed, who would ever want to burden themselves with the weight of his problems and predicaments? I also wrote that he was doomed to wander and hover forever. In truth, anyone who refuses to surrender to deception must wander. After so long, why would he now suddenly pretend to be fooled by photography?
 

4.
Returning to Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence, we must consider the strangeness of the photographers who appear in Noh’s photographs. Unlike the typical portrayal in the media, these photographers are neither aesthetic nor heroic. They are often captured in ridiculous poses as they maneuver for the best angle for their photograph. Of course, they immediately strike the viewer as possible self-portraits of Noh Suntag, so looking at them might make people feel a bit melancholy. The grain of these works is quite different from that of Noh’s other works. Previously, Noh has gone to great lengths to remind us that he is just on the other side of the framed image, that he is not an impartial recorder, and that even photographs documenting actual sites can lie and distort reality.

On the other hand, in Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence, he objectively presents scenes of the moment when a photograph is produced, and forces us to contemplate the strangeness of such moments. While his previous ‘roundabout’ works chart the limitations of photography through political scenes, these photos describe photography directly, as if to encourage us to recognize the inherent flaws with his previous on-site photographs. He is reminiscent of a restaurant owner specializing in the Korean dish ‘sun-dae’ (pig intestines stuffed with various ingredients), who eagerly grabs a disinterested person and tries to give the gritty details of how the dish is made. It is as if he wants to say, ‘Now that you know how it is made, can you still savor it?’ As such, the series seems to provide further evidence of Noh’s habitual doubt.

By continuing to photograph even while openly doubting photography, Noh is demonstrating the severity of his addiction to photography. Examining his photo-essay Fur, I began to think that maybe this doubt is what he likes most about photography. How fickle and capricious photography is—but that’s what makes it so captivating! If he weren’t so drawn to the doubt itself, then why would he continue to feverishly take photographs and write like an addict?

For an artist and photographer, one advantage of such an addiction is the sheer amount of work one can produce. In photography, of course, it takes tremendous effort and diligence to produce the huge number of shots needed to capture a single moment of transcendence. While Noh’s photography operates very differently from conventional photojournalism, he still benefits from the quick hands and relentless work ethic of a photojournalist, which are rare qualities in the art world.

Thus, Noh will never become exhausted. So long as our disconnected and alienated world continues to squeak with explosive bursts of social conflicts, Noh Suntag will be able to run through the streets in hot pursuit. He will stay true to his belief that he and his camera must wander due to the reality of the division of the two Koreas, and he will continue to produce his bizarre but beautiful photographs.

He is not the type of person who can easily change. For example, in the preface of his catalogue Oh Bu Ba (2013), he wrote ‘How strange it is, in Korea in the spring of 2013, to idly take photos of kids whining for piggyback rides even as the fog of the nuclear war lingers in the air’. He used almost the same wording in the preface for The strAnge ball (2006), and this sentiment can be traced further back to the worldview of Smells like the Division of Korean peninsula (2004). In this belief, he remains as stubborn as an ox, which sets him apart from the majority of Koreans who once shared his feelings about the ‘reality of the division’ but now speak more positively about ‘neoliberalism and globalization’ or the ‘structural contradiction of capitalism’.

With his stubborn consistency, the artist Noh Suntag will not be easily depleted. Even if Korea were to be reunified, North and South Korea would quickly become homogenized, and there would still be many world issues in need of our attention. Now that the digital network allows photography to be distributed and consumed at a lightning speed, both belief and disbelief seem to be stronger than ever. All of this is ample material for the art of Noh Suntag.

The question is, will the addict Noh be satisfied with such issues, or will he continue to develop an increased tolerance, causing him to require more potent stimuli? Could he ever really feel content taking the same type of photographs, still rushing to the scenes with his gray hair? It seems somewhat ironic that artists’ works usually change over time, because our thoughts and minds do not change as much. Looking back, Noh’s photography has actually changed quite a bit. In the wake of his series ReallyGood, Murder (quick and sharp snapshots) and The Forgetting Machine (his unquestionable masterpiece), he is not as playful as he once was. The tones and colors of his photography have become lighter, and the dark humor of The strAnge ball and State of Emergency are nowhere to be seen. His most recent photography looks much more morose than ever before.

Sneaky Snakes in Scenes of Incompetence may be a card that he kept up in his sleeves for a long time. But how many more cards does he have left? After directly exposing the strange and uncanny nature of the act of taking photographs, what is left for him to show us? Of course, Noh will not stop so easily. Like any great card player will tell you, the real game begins when you have no good cards left in your hand. Likewise, real travel begins when you have nowhere left to go, and true addiction starts when you could not possibly be any more addicted.

Originally, I thought I would conclude this article by sharply rebuffing those critics—myself included—who have commanded Noh to continuously advance in terms of both form and content. Such things are easy for critics to suggest, but is there really such thing as continuous advancement? Does any critic really believe that such a thing is even possible? Critics simply love to point to some ephemeral examples, like the Russian avant-garde, as evidence of such moment, and then assume a haughty attitude in front of the artists.

But in the course of writing, I changed my mind. If the artist himself wants it this way, who I am to suggest otherwise? Noh himself is clearly addicted to advancing the form and content of photography. So I say that we stragglers, who quietly put down our cameras after reading Susan Sontag, should just silently watch the ridiculous yet sorrowful back of the suffering artist, Noh Suntag.

References

• [비평] 앓는 작가 노순택
  [Critique] Noh Suntag: The Artist Who Continually Suffers