PhotoSight, a special exhibition of photos from the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and Art Bank, Korea.
The history of photography consists of a series of different attempts to prove that a photo can apprehend more than what a human eye can see. The early Pictorialist movement shattered the perception that photos should serve a strictly documentary function, thus initiating the rise of photography as a new artistic medium. In the 1920s, Surrealists sought to represent our invisible mental landscape, and their creative efforts led to the multilateral development of various aesthetic features of photography. Other movements that arose in the early 20th century, such as New Objectivity and straight photography, prioritized objective documentation, but they still aimed to transcend the limitations of the naked eye through strict representation and detailed description. In the process of fixating three-dimensional reality within a two-dimensional plane, photography either penetrates into the object to reveal its hidden essence, or bounces off the object's surface. Either way, photography continuously pursues a mode of seeing that is unavailable to biological vision. Today, of course, this is truer than ever, with digital photography allowing for an endless array of revisions and manipulations. After all, the mechanical features that allow photography to faithfully record the visible world inevitably instill the urge to go beyond what we can see. This apparent contradiction is at the core of photography's capacity to freely and persuasively investigate reality.
In photography, the concept of perspective refers to how we perceive and interpret the reality surrounding us. But in today's reality, we are immersed in images that we are incapable of interpreting. We cannot judge whether they are true or false, which means that we cannot trust our own vision. In such a world, there is no choice but to investigate what it means to "see," on the existential level. Our awareness of reality, which dictates our entire attitude towards life, is inextricably bound to our considerations of perspective.
In this context, this exhibition introduces several trends in contemporary photography that are explicitly concerned with the significance of "seeing." Some of the exhibited photographs may take advantage of flaws in our vision to raise questions about the authenticity of scenes that are reflected on our eyes, or else they might utilize the features that distinguish a camera lens from our eye to capture uncanny elements of reality. In addition, other exhibited photographs use different methods to visualize the realm of experience and imagination beyond the limitations of visual perception. The various attempts are united by the drive to delineate the gap between the visible reality that surrounds us and the internal actuality that we feel and experience. Rather than trying to narrow or bridge the gap, these works simply reveal its existence, reminding us that we must accept it as an inevitable part of our lives.
