[Unstagram] What Is Obvious Becomes Transparent First.

Three years ago, there was a case in Changnyeong where a stepfather and biological mother were found to be routinely abusing their 9-year-old daughter. The parents beat the daughter, burned her with hot objects, tied her up with chains, and did not feed her properly. One day, the child escaped by climbing out onto the roof of a five-story multi-family house where she was confined and fled through a neighboring house. A citizen who saw the barefoot child running away reported it to the police, bringing the case to public attention. It was widely reported in the media and sparked public outrage, but the incident was soon forgotten. According to a newspaper article reporting on the trial of the parents after some time had passed, the abused girl’s stepsibling (the stepfather’s biological child) said, "When Dad and Mom hit my sister, it felt like she became transparent and disappeared." It is unclear whether this was a direct quote from the children or if the police conceptualized the children’s words during the investigation and translated it into the word "transparent." However, it was chilling and astonishing that the children perceived the phenomenon of objects in the real world becoming 'transparent.' This means that no matter how evil and cruel an act is, if it is routinely committed in a stereotypical way, both the person and the act disappear from the perspective of others. It is not just pretending not to see, but actual invisibility?transparency. Even the noun "abuse" has become such a transparent and numb word. People no longer react to such words.

Things that are so ordinary that they seem always present, whether beautiful or horrific, eventually become taken for granted, and even the awareness of them disappears, becoming transparent. This means they vanish right before our eyes. The concept of language or expressions becoming transparent was once an inflated idea in the mind as a symbol or metaphor. But the fact that children recognized transparency to such an extent shows that it was a persistent and natural occurrence, which is frightening. Looking around, the attitudes of people around a person and their actions gradually erase that person’s existence, eventually making that person transparent?this happens frequently in human society. Not only people but many facts of the world become fixed as taken-for-granted and disappear from view. What is taken for granted is at risk of disappearing?this applies to all beings and facts in the world. It is necessary to look with different eyes to see if there are people, objects, or even family members around us who are becoming increasingly transparent. Although it is taken for granted and thus not clearly visible now, rediscovering what was once precious will also help one’s own life.

The subjects in the photo also become transparent in a similar way. As the exposure time lengthens, moving objects start to disappear. During the 30-second exposure, people and cars passed by, but they almost vanished in the photo. (Seoul, 2011)

What allows us to see the transparent things in the world again is a three-dimensional perspective. It means being able to view facts and beings from various viewpoints. Novelist Fran?oise Sagan called this intelligence. Intelligence is "the ability to think about one problem from various perspectives and the ability to learn by changing viewpoints." Art also plays a role in protecting beings that disappear from view by looking at and reinterpreting the world from multiple perspectives. The reason photography is considered art is because it continues various attempts to see the world differently.

(Innsbruck, Austria, 2010)

For reference, the child is reported to be doing well in foster care, and the perpetrator stepfather was sentenced to 7 years, while the biological mother received a 4-year prison sentence.

Editor's NoteWriting about photos and visible things, past time, and human relationships. ‘Unstagram’ is a coined term meaning photographic (gram) stories that are not (un~) instant (insta~).

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.