STATEMENT OF WORK

Unseen Photographs

In late September 2021, I abruptly woke up in the middle of my sleep. It was still dark and quiet outside of the window. I poured water into a dimly visible glass in the dark kitchen. My empty stomach ached after drinking cold water. When trying to lie down on the bed, my iPhone on the desk emitted light and eliminated the darkness; The lighting withered shortly, and I ignored it. But it was not easy for me to fall asleep as usual. I kept tossing and turning. For lack of anything better, I backed to my desk and looked at my phone screen. A short text. It was from my older brother.

"Dad passed away this morning."

Sitting in my dark room, I tried to remember the last time I saw him and needed to retrace my memory for over a decade. Then, of course, we poured harsh words on each other that day. It broke my heart, not only because my dad passed away but because it was tough for me to find good memories with him.

I took a flight to Seoul at JFK Airport and left behind a bustling and exciting mood at the beginning of the Fall semester. My older sister's family could not come to Seoul because of the strict Covid-19 policy in Australia, where they live. So my brother and I met at dad's house in his hometown to clean and discard dad's belongings. It was in a small rural town by the sea with vast differences in ebb and flow in the middle west of South Korea. The house was like a summer villa he had prepared over two decades ago for his later years. My brother told me what had happened to him, briefly. In September, Dad gave up on his business and permanently moved back from Seoul to his hometown after over five decades. Then a week later, he passed away. My brother and I looked around dad's house. So many of his belongings were unpacked. In the garden, there were many persimmon trees. Every branch of the tree drooped because there were plenty of persimmons. Dad did not have enough time to harvest them in the first year he settled in his hometown. I picked some persimmons and left them when I visited my dad's grave near the house.   

While I organized his stuff, I found dad's notebook. My father had grown up poor and worried about money his entire life. He had written down his schedule and details of his spending every day. It seemed like an old habit. The notebook showed how careful he was to make this list in recent years.

I never expected to find my belongings in his house because I had not lived with him for a long time. It also seemed he needed to move frequently in Seoul in his later years. However, I found a bookshelf that I used to use, and there were some of my old books, letters, clutter, and a camera.

It was a toy film camera shaped like a fruit juice drink. The camera's surface has a big cheesy fruit still-life photo like pineapple, orange, apple, grape, and cherry tomatoes. Over the fruit-image is a fake name logo of this juice drink, SUNNY FRUIT JUICE DRINK, filled with gradation colors from bright yellow to red-orange. There is an artificial ingredients list on another side. A tiny viewfinder is situated in a corner where I can see the frame roughly. Also, a short transparent straw protrudes on the side, but this straw is a shutter button. When I press the straw, the cover of the plastic lens opens in the middle of the juice camera. It exposes 35mm film inside the camera. I assume it has a wide-angle lens, like 28mm, a fixed aperture, around f/8, and a single shutter speed of 1/125 second. After exposing a whole film, I rewind it with a rewind knob, take it out, and load a new film. It is crappy and restrictive, but a perfect camera.

I remember how I bought this camera. At the beginning of my 20s, I could not afford to buy a SLR camera. Then, one day, I found this juice camera in a gift shop and bought it for $3-5. After that, it was my daily camera because it was inexpensive, light, small, and unpredictable. A lot of pictures surprised me a lot. It was such a pure pleasure.

I completely forgot about this camera because I could buy proper and good SLR, Range Finder, Point & Shoot cameras from my mid-20s. The juice camera was getting far from my hands and memory. An undeveloped film still remained in the camera. It is one of my favorite color-negative films at that time: REALA, manufactured by Fujifilm, which discontinued production in 2017. I loved its cinematic look: light, transparent but vivid colors. It is exposed around halfway in the days of my early 20s. What is on there will probably remain a secret forever.

And now, this juice camera itself is also a photograph to me. The portrait is alive in my imagination. I imagine my father putting the juice camera on the bookshelf in every one of his new places. He mutters in a low voice, and nobody hears it.

Bluets

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ji0x8bOe9qCWfWXIsRaDQ?si=3ee603274896493a

Nightwalk

A one-eyed man had written a million letters down.

Then, his dense words evolved into darkness.

Wander in the darkness.

The night, every lonely shadow embraces tender each other.

The scent of street lights wafts in on the wind.

Then, stars come a long way to rest on houses, cars, trees, and concrete.

I amuse myself by thinking about the time difference between lights.

How long have I been walking?

The moon gets closer, blowing her horn in the low register.

At an unnamed street bend, an old lady looks at me.

She draws out a rock from inside her chest.

And put it down close to her feet.

Ripples rise on the concrete from the rock.

The circles grow bigger and bigger.

Stars float down and brush past my feet.