If you thought for a minute that I took this picture than I am very flattered, but I doubt you did. This digital translation of a c-print comes from the work of Hee Jin Kang, who documented her parent's Korean deli in Ridgewood, Queens either after or while studying photography at Yale.
Coming across Kang's work was one of my rewards for the risks I took last week which I wrote about in the Lessons of the Little Red Hen. While nervously renting strobes at Calument the wash of panic temporarily vanished and a vaguely blissful feeling came over me as I came across Kang's work in an issue of Nueva Luz they had lying on the counter. And I hadn't yet seen her newer series of work, Kissable.
Bliss in the tape...has packing tape ever looked so appealing? It's Dutch light falling on Ridgewood sundries. Who needs posies when a security panel looks so good? In a statement about the project Kang wrote "My parents would tell me repeatedly that there was nothing to photograph at the store. Where they saw nothing, I saw everything." It fascinated me that from viewing this series of images, entitled Sandy's Deli, that you can watch her seeing everything, all the everything we all see, consciously or not, the everything that with great unspoken tenderness becomes a medium binding us together like her luminous tape.
1 comment:
I see things differently when I'm carrying my camera. Still, it's hard to see the things you're supposed to overlook. The city is full of visual "noise" that becomes rich and beautiful when you look at it through a different "lens."
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