WEBZINE ACC

Beautiful moments of daily life captured through the lens

Entering the backstreets, the smell of coal briquettes drifts. The smell of kimchi stew and rice comes as well. In the backstreets, whenever I go I can sense the smell of people living. Photographer Kim Ki-chan (1938-2005) recorded the scenery of the alley for 33 years, from 1968 to 2001. How can we sense the scent of the hometown from his photos? How can we hear the laughter of children in his pictures? His photographs reflect the lives and stories of people, holding a warm feeling of compassion.

Kim captured the daily lives of people living in Jungnim-dong and the nearby backstreets in Seoul. His work is regarded as the essence of documentary photography in the field. Rather than delivering a strong message with the spirit of the era in his work, the photographer was applauded for his ethnographic style that excluded his own thoughts and showed what it really was.

His photos are artwork and are also regarded as records and historical material. It is worth not only seeing but also reading the image. The work closely observed and recorded the ordinary days of people in the backstreets living in the same time and space.

His work of 30 years was possible since he had built a rapport with the people in the backstreet—the artist assimilated with the locals so that the subjects did not become conscious of the presence of the camera. In his later years, the photographer searched for people he had captured before as if he were looking for his own family. To him, the people from the backstreet were not just objects or materials for his art. It was the true rapport that anthropologists talk about.

ACC Photo Archiving that records lost scenery

“The photos of Kim Ki-chan” is a collection from the photo archiving project of the ACC and is a historical record that captures the environmental changes that occurred due to urbanization and industrialization in Korea.¹⁾ The photos are valuable data since they present the communities, including neighbors cooperating with each other in the backstreets, living together, the customs and daily lives of the backstreet culture, and the changes that happened to the community due to economic development and city reorganization.

The archiving process selected the original 35 mm negative film and color slide film, which contain 10,000 photos by the artist, and digitally scanned them. Then it classified the pictures systematically so that archive users could access and use them in various ways. The digitized images are currently donated to the ACC Archive and preserved.

The vanished backstreets, overflowing apartments

“The apartment human race” was born as people spent their whole lives and created their own world in apartments. This is a product of the era’s national strategy of high economic development. For people who flocked to the city in search of work, the apartments were an efficient way of providing housing. And the change seemed logical and useful for some time.

However, apartments have now become symbols of increasing personal assets, speculation in real estate, and desire beyond the original purpose of housing, and transaction prices are considered more important products. In today’s society, we are not just residents but mere consumers of apartment space.

Due to reconstruction and urban redevelopment projects fueled by the desire of new humanity, some people lost friends, their neighborhoods, memories, and even hometowns to return to. Many people have even lost the foundation of their lives (for some, it would be the site of survival) in the process. Urban development drove out the memories and history of the town, and society chose an easy way to kick out the poor instead of looking for ways to devise a law that would help solve poverty itself. People became indifferent to what was happening outside the apartment.

Can a society that has become insensitive to eliminating and concealing be a healthy society? With a building constructed, cultural spaces are destroyed, and historical places accumulated throughout time in the backstreets vanish. And through painful regret, we learned that “the history of the town (community) can never be compensated by money.”

Perhaps this is the reason Kim aspired to capture everything that is being swept away due to urbanization with his camera. His photos present the modern history of Seoul, which struggled and suffered from growth that happened too fast in such a short time. The work delivers the message of regret for the things that are disappearing and the traces of our lives that we missed out on while working too hard.

Backstreets, neighborhoods, and living together

If you find the backstreet photos taken by Kim Ki-chan beautiful, it is because they were taken when “neighborhoods” existed. Staying and living in one neighborhood indicated that a person is living by dwelling in his own trace. The society in the photo was when people stayed and led their lives in the backstreets. We find the photo beautiful and heartfelt because it reflects the last scenery of Seoul, where different generations continued to pass their traces on as they stayed in one neighborhood.

The figures in the photos by Kim look like they care for each other and hope for a better future together, despite their relatively poor conditions. It is the memory of the good old days, through which they struggled and suffered; did the people in the backstreets and the redeveloped neighborhoods become happy? We already know the sad fact that the road of urban development does not necessarily extend to human development. Where did the children from the backstreets go? The neighborhoods disappeared, and they had to drift away.

By looking at the backstreet photos by Kim Ki-chan, we can find alternatives to “living together,” since the backstreets are the roads that connect people. We need to consider what the model of community, city, and society we hope to establish should be. The future of our city should be a community-based society. The city should be a place where people from different backgrounds come together and communicate, where people want to walk with their feet, and where people can restore the scenery of the vanished neighborhood. Most importantly, restoration of human relations should be the first priority. I hope his works give us the inspiration to consider the true meaning of residence. We make a neighborhood, but the neighborhood also makes us.