Three Photographers, Three Kinds of Light

Even with the same film and the same theme, photographs spread out in entirely different directions. The photo section of 5ft magazine Vol.01 records how three photographers, Noh Ae-gyeong, Park Soon Yeol and Jang Hyeong-su, each looked at light and shadow in their own way.

Here we pull out just one key photograph from each, and briefly follow lines from their working notes in the first issue to show where each of the three ways of seeing began.

Noh Ae-gyeong: Photographs That Walk Through the Traces of Time

A place that once glittered has come through a long stretch of time and still exists, holding on to its memories.

Noh Ae-gyeong's working notes begin with wandering through places left abandoned for years, looking for the traces light and shadow have left behind. Looking at things that are worn but have not disappeared, at spaces where past and present sit side by side, she asks what time and objects really are. The flowers in her key photograph take in even the time left after they wilted, and show a quiet life that remains after the glitter is gone.

Park Soon Yeol: Light Is People, Shadow Is Things

Photography was the work of capturing light, and also of capturing the shadow that can never be separated from it.

In his working notes, Park Soon Yeol wrote that for him, the light in a photograph was people, and the shadow was everything that wasn't. That thought holds even in scenes with no one in them. Light falling into a cup, a shadow stretched across the floor, the way still life and light tangle together: these stand in for the warmth of a person we cannot see.

Jang Hyeong-su: Fragments of Memory That Stay

My photographs try to hold fragments of memory where light and shadow blend together.

Jang Hyeong-su says he can't know whether a scene is something he saw in the past or something that will be remembered for a long time to come. What matters is that a photograph reaches a viewer's own memories, or a scene deep inside them, and stays there. A shopping cart and the shadows on a wall, light falling over a worn-down space: they move past the actual place into a personal memory, something you feel you've seen somewhere before.

The three photographs run at different temperatures, but they all stand before the same question. After the light has passed, what is left in the photograph?