[Unstagram] Photos, Poetry, and Truth

Well-taken landscape photographs leave little room for the viewer's unique intuition to intervene. They appear as complete, ready-made products?simply beautiful and splendid scenes with little space for imagination or emotion. Rather, if there are areas of emptiness and deficiency hidden or blurred within, viewers can fill those spaces with images of intuition and non-intuition. Therefore, even in trivial expressions bearing the name of art, deficiency often serves as a visual consideration rather than excess. This concept contrasts with the desire for straightforward beauty.

The stronger the photograph’s appeal or beauty, the more pronounced this tendency tends to be. Not only the term "landscape photograph" but also adjectives like "splendid" and "beautiful" fail to cross the valley of intuition. Adjectives that come after witnessing the reality can supplement the feeling of the reality, but adjectives alone, preceding it, cannot replace or supplement anything. Emotional matters such as human imagination and intuition actively operate in the spaces left by indirectness. It is necessary to mobilize memory, knowledge, emotion, and experience to evoke a living metaphor. That is why poetry exists amid the rampant words.

A cat climbing the stairs suddenly looked back. Then, after a moment, it nonchalantly entered through the front gate. In moments that seem insignificant, there is no room for truth or falsehood to intervene. (Namhae, Gyeongnam, 2011) ⓒ Heo Younghan

Walter Benjamin wrote that "truth resides in small and insignificant things, and photography has the power to find the truth in small and insignificant things." Like poetry, photography only mentions the small truths of the world. It does so without being definitive, merely mentioning, showing rather than telling. The meaning of moments that cannot be captured by photography or expressed in words lies in the truth that endures silently behind facts that cannot be defined by language. People want to translate that into their own language.

Sometimes, there may be poets and photographers?or poetry and photography?that desire to speak of great truths, but it is rare for those to reveal great truths. The very existence of the world filled with small truths is the great truth that cannot be spoken. Truth occasionally appears before human eyes, but mostly it does not manifest as the form of truth. Instead, the keen-eyed recognize and interpret the fragile signs of truth barely held in a corner.

In the brief moment when a butterfly flies before your eyes, the air is filled with the truth of emptiness. It is just that human language cannot catch up. (Mongolia Khovsgol, 2017) ⓒHeo Younghan

The world of metaphor is filled more with images left behind after words than with the inherent functions of words themselves. The concrete subjects in photographs can transcend their informational individuality to become metaphors. The power of photography (mostly in art) sometimes lies not in clear communication of meaning but in showing ambiguity itself. The relationships of existence that both are and are not.

Photography is simply photography and also everything that is not photography. Poetry is the same.

The rain falling on a summer night, people heading home, umbrellas, and rushing buses fill the space with an indescribable, sincere meaninglessness. (Seoul Gwanghwamun, 2013) ⓒHeo Younghan

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