Jungjin Lee was born in Korea in 1961. She studied calligraphy in childhood and majored in ceramics at Hongik University, graduating with a Bachelor’s of Fine Art in 1984. After graduating Lee worked as a photo journalist and later as a freelance photographer. In 1987, she immersed herself for one year in a project focused on documenting the life of an old man who made his living hunting for wild ginseng. This experience motivated Lee to become a photographer and expand her technical knowledge of photography by traveling to New York City and enrolling in New York University to pursue an MA in photography. While in New York City, Lee worked for the photographer Robert Frank whose travels across the United States may have influenced Lee’s own decision to take a road trip across the United States. In her travels she encountered the American Desert, a landscape that she is deeply moved by and which becomes the subject of several of her photographic series, including Desert, American Desert I–IV, On Road, Wind and Remains. Lee photographs these barren landscapes when they are transformed by the tumultuous weather, discarded refuse, decaying structures and by her own photographic process. Lee's Unnamed Road was part of This Place.
Photographic process
Lee uses a unique photographic process:
For my work, the darkroom process is just as important as the digital process. Throughout the process, I focus on transmitting on my prints the feelings that I felt as the time of taking the photograph. I try to deliver the essence of what I truly want to express.
She begins by photographing the subject with a medium-format panoramic camera. She prints on a traditional mulberry paper which she hand sensitizes with a brush using Liquid Light. This print is then scanned and Lee further manipulates the image in Photoshop. The resulting image is a high contrast black and white print, in which the indexical brush marks are still visible. Lee effaces the technological capability of her digital camera to communicate her emotional state of mind at the time she takes the photograph to the viewer. This process also results in an image that recalls traditional Asian ink painting.
Recognition
Lee's photographic practice is important within the context of contemporary Korean photography, but also more broadly she is part of a contemporary photographic movement of photographers pushing the physical boundaries of photography as a medium to expose and communicate the essence of a subject. For Lee, effacing the technological capabilities of her camera allows her to explore the symbolic boundaries of landscape as a genre. Photo scholar and critic Eugenia Parry explores Lee's series through the lens of Buddhist spirituality in the essay that accompanies Lee's photobook Wind. Parry observes that in Lee's photographs she contrasts discarded props of human life with the land, symbolically acting as her on Buddhist teacher, asking viewers to "view ordinary things, love change, tolerate absolute incomprehensibility. Contemplate the temporal, recognize the celestial". Photo critic and historian Vicki Goldberg observes that Lee's landscapes represent her own, "introspective states and thoughts." While the majority of Lee's work focuses on the land; in several series she explores other subjects in the series including Pagodas ; crumbling Buddhist sculptures, Buddhas ; every objects, Thing and portraits, Breath. Lee has received several awards recognizing her work as well as group and solo exhibitions, commissions as well as numerous publications documenting her work.
Publications
Solo exhibitions
1989 Camera Club Of New York "A Lonely Cabin In A Far Away Island," New York, USA
