In 2018 I visited South Korea by invitation from my good friend Kidoo. I think we spent around six days in total shooting, with a whole lot of driving thrown in. When I first arrived in South Korea I remember thinking how amazingly modern Seoul is, and I had wondered if I might find anything to shoot at all. As we ventured out of the capital I never ever felt that there was a clear demarcation point between urban and the rural landscapes. Kidoo assured me there are national parks in South Korea but for most of my journey I was greeted with a similar infrastructure to the one in Japan: lots of industrial areas, built up places, and any free land was used for farming.
I never make casual images. I never take the camera out of the bag to make images I’m not intending on keeping. I think I passed the point many years ago of knowing when a composition is worth shooting or not. In my earlier years I would just shoot something even if I knew it wasn’t any good. That seldom happens now, and it’s not because of the cost of film or the cost of anything. It’s just that I think I know when I’m mostly wasting my time on a place.
So it was a great surprise at the end of the six full days of shooting that I found I had around twenty rolls of film exposed. I remember saying to Kidoo ‘I found the landscape quite hard to shoot, and I didn't feel at the time that I was getting much, but I’m surprised to find I’ve shot twenty rolls of film, so there must be something in them!’. My South Korea portfolio is now one of my favourites. It was a surprise to both Kidoo and myself how nicely they turned out.
It is often a reminder to me that like compound interest in a bank, image acquisition is a slow accumulative process. It is very easy to think you are getting nowhere but one should cast those kinds of thoughts from their mind. We are not in the business of trying to accumulate successful shots. We should just shoot when we like something and avoid shooting if we’re not feeling it.
I have had many journeys over the past decade where I have found myself creating work I could not have imagined a year before. It is always of great delight to me to feel that there are always surprises and unexpected fortunes up ahead with image making.
It is not supposed to be rote. It is completely fluid, and with that, we need to learn to let go, and see where it takes us.