tales from Korea

I’m happy and excited that I’ll be having a photography exhibition this month! It’s called “Days in India” and will display 9 prints at the Guillaume Cafe in Seoul. Please check below for details on the exhibition and how to get there.

Exhibition details

The exhibition will be held at the Guillaume Cafe from the 9th of July until the 30th of July.

The opening night is the 9th of July and will run from about 7pm to 10pm.

Wine, food and other drinks will be available, free of charge!

If you’re interested in photography, India, or joining the Flickr in Seoul group I suggest you come along to the opening, meet some people and enjoy yourself.

To get there

• Address: Gangnam-gu, Cheongdam-dong 88-37, Insung Bldg #101, Seoul 135-954, Korea
• Phone: +82 2 512 6701
• Email: contact@maisonguillaume.com

The closest subway station is Gangnam-Gu station on line number 7.
You can take bus #472 heading north from Gangnam-Gu station.
Look for the large Smoothie King and Burger King, go up the hill and it’s on your left.

The flyer

Many thanks to my sponsors Guillaume, 708 Art and my friends David, Youngdoo, Hyunyo and Mel for their support and advice during this period.

I know I haven’t been updating much the last while, but I don’t really like writing general updates and short banters, that’s what facebook is for. Also, not that much has been happening recently. But last week, I finally got away from working for a while and got to see and photograph the Buddhist lantern festival, held near Buddha’s birthday on May the 21st. The Buddhists’ are a quiet and humble bunch, really, and you don’t hear from them much during the year normally. Most of the year is spent fighting back crazy Christians who hassle people everyday and make sure no one forgets about their religion, the Buddhists’ just seem to meditate and hide away until this day comes around.

Money and religion can be a bit of a dodgy thing, the Christians here don’t make bones about it — it’s very frank that they pay to join a church and ‘donate’ about 10% of their pay every month to their respecting churches. I wasn’t too sure about the Buddhist temples, but many of them are ancient heritage sites so the government probably supports them to some degree. I learned one new thing about the temples and money around the time of the festival, though. Putting up a message/wish into an overhanging lantern in a temple is actually a significant ‘investment’, I heard prices in the couple of hundred dollars. Then there are the lanterns inside the temple buildings which only hold messages for the deceased relatives. These messages can run into the thousands of dollars. At one temple in the middle of Seoul we saw a sign hung outside saying “Be honest! Don’t lie about the money” or something like that (The Korean translation was weird), the message from another temple warning them not to forget about their Buddhist ideals and accepting money for their own personal gain. Whatever is going on, it’s pretty simple for me — Buddhists go about their own business and don’t bother anyone while many Christians make annoying people an incredibly popular pastime.

I went to the festival with the Flickr in Seoul photo group but we got a rubbish spot in which to shoot; missing many of the better parts of the parade. The parade itself, was also moving rather quickly made getting shots pretty difficult. I shot almost 300 frames of the people passing and the beautiful lanterns, and got less them 10 keepers. Afterwards, though, I kept shooting scenes around the parade and got some good results.

Check out some images I shot from a temple in Seoul and from the parade:

During one meeting last year we were informed by one of the SMOE coordinators that the Gangdong district was going to make additional afternoon classes entitled “Arts and Sports”, and took the names of teachers that may be interested. When i though of the title, the first thing that jumped into my head was photography. “Hey there’s something I know about, it’s an art… I can teach that, right?”. Quite a few teachers signed up, each with their own ideas: Music, knitting, modelling, painting, etc (I didn’t see anyone offering to teach a sport). A few weeks went by and the title seemed to have changed to “Arts and Crafts camp”, it seemed that these extra classes were a first for the Gangdong area and they were altering the purpose of the classes as needed. Each school advertised the classes… but not surprisingly, numbers were low. After all, students have to go to the winter camp, most of them probably go to hagwons (Private learning institutes) and aren’t too enthusiastic about signing up for voluntary extra classes. My school seemed to fair better – with my co-teachers advertising the class, 4 students signed up.

We heard finally, the Gangdong office had decided that classes must have over 5 students to proceed – the final numbers came in, my class was the only one with over 5 students; in fact I was pleased to see that 7 had signed up – 3 students from other schools as well. I felt sorry for the other teachers, some classes had zero students. I feel it more a case of the schools doing a bad job of advertising the classes rather then the subject of the classes themselves. The classes were laid out as 3 classes per day, starting at 2pm, for 5 days (One week essentially – 15 classes in total). I made an overview of what the teaching schedule was like but it was a little stretched, to say the least. What should I do for 15 classes? It seemed a bit much. It ended up changing to 10 classes, which was great, so I decided to do them back to back and have it from 2pm – 3:30pm for the Monday to Friday.

I spent a while preparing for the lessons… Photography, what was I thinking? These are 1st and 2nd grade middle grade students (14 and 15 year old), can they handle this? I mean seriously, photography has some pretty dynamic scientific components with some very specific and uncommon vocabulary. How can I dumb it down though, and then expect them to take good photographs? I decided to just put in the essential information without dumbing it down and all, and though that real life demoing might peak their interest enough to try and remember [and use] the information. The schedule was set for the week, Monday and Tuesday would be classroom based – powerpoints, the history of Photography, the uses, etc, all the way into how photography works – how to take a good picture. Wednesday was half based in the classroom, the first part was just about composition – I tried to emphasise the importance. The second half of the class was them running around the school taking photographs of each other, trying to apply the information they learned during the last two days.

When the classes started, I actually only had 6 students, one had dropped out due to sickness. It was more a little more convenient for making teams though, and I easily divided them into three pairs. I informed them of a competition that would take up all day Thursday in which we would go outside and shoot for the whole 1 and a half hour, the place was Garden5, just across the road from my school. On Friday we would be choosing and editing the photographs using Photoshop, their choices would be submitted and I would pick the winning team there and then. Friday was a day for criticism too – I explained how to give and take criticism, and how important it is in photography.

The competition:

I explained the students must submit a final 5 photographs, based on these requirements:

• Photograph One:
• Portrait, shallow depth of field.
• Photograph Two:
• Theme is “Circles”.
• Photograph Three:
• A building, deep depth of field.
• Photograph Four:
• Theme is “Moving people”.
• Photograph Five:
• A photograph of your choice.

Here are a few images of the students when we went out shooting on the competition day.

Some of the students creativity was just inspirational, I felt like I really got them thinking about how to use their own imagination and skill to try and capture something a normal person would never have thought to look at that way. Here are the images taken by the winning team:

I have to say, the class was an absolute success and I really enjoyed teaching it. I’ve never taught anybody photography before, I still have a lot to learn myself, but to get the elementary stuff across was still really useful for these aspiring students. It was such a good feeling to see them inspired, being creative, having fun and following me around like my own little photo posse, armed with SLRs slung over their shoulders.