I first came to know A Thousand Cameras through photographer Sung Nam-Hun, whom I met while participating in the Series category of Fujifilm Photo Festa 2025, and through exchanges with photographers from earlier cohorts of the program.
I was especially drawn to the fact that it is an archival program that records and accumulates images of Seoul with the aim of “recording today’s Seoul and passing it on to tomorrow.” Having worked on Relationships, which looks back at a vanished past through images made in the present, the direction of the program felt very familiar to me. I could also naturally understand the value it placed on documentation, knowing that as time passes and the face of “fast-moving Seoul” continues to change, those records will only become more valuable.
I had always thought highly of the program, but I did not initially feel that I had to take part. That changed when Hongdae, the neighborhood where I was born and raised, was chosen as the theme for the 12th edition. My connection with Sung Nam-Hun through Photo Festa, the relationships I had formed with photographers from A Thousand Cameras, and Hongdae itself as my hometown all came together at that moment, ultimately leading me to join the 12th edition.
Through the 12th edition of A Thousand Cameras, I photographed Hongdae and the wider Mapo area, the place I consider my hometown. The project led me to write the artist statement below, and later, with an exhibition at Ryugaheon, I was able to bring the journey of the first chapter, Relationships, to a natural close.
A Stranger’s Hometown
I was born in Mapo-gu, near Hongdae.
Mapo is my hometown, but I left it long ago, and few memories remain clearly.
What lingers are only fragments: the long journeys changing between buses and subways, a university I vaguely remember, and a handful of scenes.
When I began walking the streets with a camera,
the distance between the Mapo that existed in reality and the Mapo in my memory was greater than I had expected.
The place I once knew no longer existed,
and even in the neighborhood where I was born, I wandered like a visitor—a stranger.
As I walked and photographed with others, the hometown I thought I knew was dismantled and assembled again.
The images I made while gradually narrowing the distance between past and present became both
a record of mourning for “my place,” which had disappeared,
and a process of learning how to understand the Mapo that had been reborn.
I came to realize that the hometown I carried within me had quietly come to an end.
At the same time, I became a little more able to accept
the “Seoul of here and now,” being remade through the expectations and stories of many different people.
The place I once knew no longer exists,
and yet I still call this place:
My hometown, Seoul.