Exposure 2011: Submitted

COMPLETE!

http://akwak.artistswanted.org/exposure2011

I'm satisfied.

Lee Family

I recently did a very quick improptu photoshoot with my favorite kids! Hayden and Aaron. For the past two Christmas', Dami has graciously given me the opportunity to photograph her two crazy, but handsome boys whom I adore. For the most part, they cooperated. We bribed them with ice cream, and it worked like a charm.

Random sunsets

I know I'm not the only one who has the urge to pull out my camera whenever driving by a sunset.

photo competition

Halmoni in Colorado, 2009

http://www.exposureaward.com/

I've been thinking about concepts for this project. When entering a competition, an automatic response is to think that only a grandiose, extravagant, out-of-this-world type of entry has any possibility of winning an award. Which...for me is pretty intimidating. My life is centered in the suburbs, in the comfortable Korean-American community that I have always known, and I don't see myself adventurously traveling to South Africa or Asia anytime soon to take some out-of-this-world photos.

Elizabeth Bishop wrote in her poem, "Questions of Travel":

What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?

Basically -- appreciate what we have, rather than living in anticipation of searching for the extraordinary on the other side of the world.

I am an descendant and a housemate to a woman who has a rich story to tell. My grandmother. She doesn't say much about the fact that she comes from a war-torn country or that she lived as a single mother of 3 while her husband was away for two decades in another country trying to support them financially. In Korean culture, we don't talk about bad things. Not to our children, and not to the public. We simply live life anticipating a brighter future to cancel out the dim past.

It only took me 24 years to see my grandmother for the person she is--a person who experienced things that we only read in war memoirs, movies, and textbooks. I don't have to go to the other side of the world to document this great history. She is living history that I have the privilege of seeing everyday in my own home. As I dig into her past and learn more about her, I see a woman who is slowly deteriorating by the constraints of age and health. This is my attempt to introduce her to my viewers and immortalize the richness that she carries as a person.