Houston Fotofest grants face to face access to so many International artists, compressed into a few intense days. This past year’s festival brought a strong contingent of Korean photographers with highly developed work. I keep thinking about them, and I’d like to share a few of the projects with you, beginning with Kim Taedong’s Planetes.

Kim Taedong visited the historic sites in towns that bear the scars of the Korean War. For five years, he photographed war monuments under the night sky, drawn to the tension found in places with a history of violence and division. The photographs in the resulting project, Planetes, first appear almost quick and expressive, but are instead the result of much patience and a finely tuned technique. Kim Taedong offers an incredible, unexpected reversal of the popular practice of photographing star trails. He uses an equatorial mount to track the rotational axis of the star, fixing the lens to the stars even as they move. And when the heavens are still, the ground begins to shake.

What was immobile is now hauntingly animated. The soldiers who salute and eternally plant the flag are now doing so actively, like spirits come to life during the night. A stone horse ascendes, as if rising to become a constellation. A stationary ship is once again moving on the water, unmoored from the gravity of its place in history. A bridge transforms into an effervescent passageway. The walls of the buildings are rumbling; structure threatens to fall. The gaze searches for something fixed to hold onto and lands again on the firmament.

Photographs of star trails offer a brief flick of knowledge that the world is turning, that the great celestial bodies are in motion. Planetes further lengthens the sense of movement through time in a photograph, even beyond the duration of the long exposure, curving towards time eternal.



-Lisa Woodward