Wonder on parnassus

 One often looks to photography as a medium of facts. Pictures affirm that the people and places seen in a photograph were presumably at one time present in front of the lens and witnessed by the photographer. The documentary impulse runs deep, and sets an expectation that capturing reality is what the medium does best. 

So, where, then, do we place Sangyon Joo’s mysterious, fleeting and vaguely mythic images in the realm of photography? We would be misguided thinking of them as only citations of the real; they linger too long in the imaginative fringe of understanding. They are, rather, traces of the phenomenal: experiences recalled or created through the visual perception, rather than through logic.

Joo wields a range of artistic methods; selective focus, magnification, isolation of a part from the whole, juxtaposition of images, layering of moments together or truncating time, searching to discover universal order beyond simple facts.

The suggestive power of Joo’s photography opens us up to reflection, allowing us to ponder the invisible through the visible.  When people are shown, a spiritual temperament manifests. A transfiguration takes place and bodies become energized, uplifted and transformed through association with the elements; earth, air and water, then connected through light (fire).  To further the alchemical metaphor, what occurs is not distillation, but sublimation- the state where matter leaps from one form to another, abandoning the laws that bind them.

After contemplating these images, the course of action completes itself.  Her photographs become equivalents of expression and desire, and through these processes, both natural and artistic, truth may be revealed.