I spent a long time considering from whose position I should view these photographs. I chose to view them from the perspective of the artist’s mother—the position most familiar to me. The perspective of someone who either took the photograph or was photographed, who has never handled professional cameras, but has only taken pictures with disposable film cameras or widely accessible digital devices such as smartphones. This is perhaps the only way I can freely approach my relationship to photography.

From this experience, I attempt a degree of conceptualization and theorization. I would call this “photography without records.” These photographs do not arise as outcomes, but emerge from the photographer’s consciousness, reflecting upon the act of photographing itself. Let us examine the latter first.

Photography is activated within various classificatory systems depending on purpose and method: identity (amateur, professional, technician), subject (portrait, landscape, object), genre (journalistic, artistic, commercial), and so on. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that classification systems arise according to each purpose and method. Among these, photography as a professional art form uniquely records, reflects upon, teaches, and bequeaths the act of photographing itself. This feedback loop—where photography influences photography—allowed the medium to be recognized as a modern art genre.

Conversely, consider photographs whose actions are defined by purposes other than photography: leaving evidence (in court), commemorating events (weddings), representing oneself culturally (selfies). These practices become subjects of sociology or anthropology, not photographic discourse. Photography ends there as something other than photography. The reverse—non-photography becoming photography—is rarely observed, simply because we lack the institutional motivation to observe it. But what if the reverse is already happening? What would occur if we chose to observe it?

Long before photography as we know it emerged in 1839, “cameras without film” developed in various forms. The camera lucida, for example, used a prism lens to overlay the image of an object onto a drawing surface, primarily for painting. One might even describe it as a “hand-exposed photograph.” Sensitization—literally sensing light—did not rely on chemicals, but on manual skill.

Even photographic printing itself began as an attempt to eliminate drawing—what might be called “photography without drawing.” Contemporary artistic photography continues this trajectory with practices of “photography without shooting.” Photography’s concepts and practices have continually been redefined by altering their conditions and functions, whether intentionally or forcibly.

What, then, of “photography without records”? I consider this not through recent academic theory, but through the images filling my smartphone album. Just as memory is triggered by particular forms of recording, records derive meaning only when remembered. I think of artists who have published books curated from hundreds of thousands of smartphone images. Yet I know I will never revisit most of my photos. If they were deleted, I would feel little more than vague regret. The reaction after Cyworld’s collapse was similar—people had forgotten not only the images themselves, but even the fact that such images once existed.

These photographs existed only in the moment of capture. They resemble underlining passages in a book one never plans to reread. The underline is not useless—it extends the moment as a moment. Naive realists who tell people busy photographing meals, performances, or landscapes to “just look” misunderstand what is happening. Photographing is an act of arranging visibility and exposure, sometimes of waiting for events to persist, and ultimately of seeing. Perhaps we saw for the first time through that small screen.

What do we choose when we photograph? This question recalls ancient debates on memory. The fear that reliance on written records erodes the will to remember dates back to antiquity. The digitization and automation of record-keeping render such fears more legitimate. Data preservation and memory may thus be fundamentally different matters. Perhaps “photography without records” completes itself not through preservation, but through disappearance.

From this point, I leap from experience into theoretical imagination. How does art photography respond to “photography without records” emerging in mass photography? Sangha Khym prints photographs on thermal paper; dots spread, colors collapse into black and white. She adjusts the degree of degradation, sometimes rubbing the image by hand. Images that once pointed to specific individuals and memories are released from private ownership. Any everyday photograph produces the same visual outcome, making the form itself more significant than the content. This work operates as a device.

But is replacing individuality with another form not simply another automated system—similar to criticisms often leveled at non-art photography? Can we take pleasure in such transformations? The anonymous hand rubbing the image, the mythic threat of intervention from outside the image, becomes more explicit. We never demanded the return of memory or record. Faced with this intervention, what do we see?

As gestures of transformation approach threat, unexpected images emerge. As photographs are cut, heated, and copied, as erasure approaches physical deletion, the image transforms and begins to recover its specificity. Nearing nothingness—but never reaching it—the internal elements of the image call to one another. The image even calls forth the mother’s photograph: the polka-dot dress overlaps with digitally degraded halftone dots. We may now call the mother’s eyes large dots. That abstract patterns can be read as acts of calling is almost magical.

Bae Ja-eun projects such calling into the future, where the absence of an addressee demands a new body. She describes photographing objects that melt, lose form and function, or merge into a single body—spaces that resemble her thinking. When accidents circulate through me and are reproduced by my actions, spaces “resembling” them reproduce accidents and circulate as photographs. We move from reality’s logic to photography’s own operational logic.

Yet Bae Ja-eun interrupts the passage from circulation to appreciation. She burns, melts, and attaches images. The transformed image does not demand interpretation of its result, but of the act of transformation itself. The image loses its reason to remain flat, migrating onto videotape and textile surfaces. The original event becomes a state of things.

The desire to make “my mother’s memory my own” became a key for interpreting Khym’s images. Bae Ja-eun describes her own work as repeatedly excavating memories left in the form of trauma. How should we read such a statement, which seems to depict self-harm? Trauma cannot be directly extracted; the image must first be burned. Burning here does not function as deletion—it lends the image the body of something else. Within an approach that must simultaneously hold the opposing goals of erasure and remembrance, photographs lend their bodies to memories we cannot see, but must somehow confront.

Even this borrowed body is destined to disappear. Earlier, I claimed that “photography without records” had emerged in mass photography. Rather than observing it, I asked what would happen if we allowed ourselves to be observed by it. When hierarchies between domains are replaced by relations of influence, this is the response sent back by professional photography.

References

• [비평] 기록없는 사진
  [Critique] Photography Without Records