A South Korean photographer with a fear of heights began a years-long career that saw her teeter on the edge of possibility as the young woman perched herself on top of skyscrapers to capture dizzying, breathtaking vistas.
In a series of self-portraits, Ahn Jun sat on the corners of roofs and ledges of buildings. Sometimes one photo showed her entire body on a high-rise ledge, while others showed only her legs and feet above the plummeting vertical.
Experienced a feeling of emptiness
What brought the photographer to the edge of the abyss?
It wasn’t a sudden urge to seek thrills, but more of a conceptual idea that haunted Ahn Jun, a feeling of emptiness.
Contemplating that her teenage years were over, Ahn Jun saw the present as a void between the past and the future. The first time she looked out of her Manhattan apartment window, it appeared to be the epitome of this feeling.
“I got to the ledge and looked down and there was a void,” recalled the Korean, now 43.
In the past, Ahn Jun roofs always evoked a feeling of lightness and comfort. On sunny days, she would enjoy the warmth and light breeze while perched on the roof of her house, translating texts from English to Korean. At the time, she was studying for a master’s degree at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
However, when in 2007 financial crisis rocked the economy, Ahn Jun heard a stranger at a party make a dark joke that a friend of his who had lost a large amount of money in the stock market wanted to jump off a skyscraper.
Ahn Jun began to think of the roof as an ambiguous place: “For me, it is a place of rest, but for a person in despair, it can also be the place of the last moment of life.”
Became known in the world
For five years, Ahn Jun photographed himself on rooftops, sometimes wearing a climbing harness to keep his balance, and sometimes wearing nothing at all.
Although the Korean occasionally played with perspective when taking photos, she never used Photoshop to enhance the captured images.
At first, the shooting locations were the high roofs of her and her friends’ apartment buildings in New York, but over time the project expanded.
Ahn Jun received permission to photograph the 63 building in Seoul, which is considered a symbol of rapid economic development in South Korea. She also photographed in Hong Kong with the support of the country’s tourism board.
When Ahn Jun’s photo appeared on the cover of the “British Journal of Photography” issue in 2013, and her work began to be published by major online media portals, the Korean’s photographs spread around the world.
Looks with different eyes
However, it was in the same year 2013 that Ahn Jun stopped creating his series of works. According to her, after the popularity of Instagram at the beginning of the last decade, viewers began to perceive photos from heights in a different way.
At first, the Korean thought of her project as “a performance without an audience,” but on the nascent social media platform, she says, the images have turned into an ongoing trend of showing one’s life in photos.
Netizens also associate Ahn Jun’s photos with the rooftop selfie trend, where daredevils climb skyscrapers and other tall structures without equipment to pose for such photos.
Soon Ahn Jun was flooded with e-mails. Some of the reviews were positive, but others criticized the Korean woman’s work or sexually harassed her.
Ahn Jun has moved on to other projects, although some photographs continue to be exhibited, most recently in Paris and at the Daegu Photography Biennale in South Korea. She will include some of her work in an exhibition at the Museum of Photography in Nara, Japan.
An early series of self-portraits influenced the photographer’s later work – Ahn Jun continues to explore time, space and gravity: “Because I think of life as a process of free fall.”
While studying for her PhD at Hongik University in Seoul, which she graduated in 2017, Ahn Jun became interested in the potential of high-speed photography to capture images that seem to defy the laws of physics. In two subsequent series of photographs, she captured suspended small boulders and apples, completely still and at the same time moving over seascapes and architectural spaces as they fall to the ground.
From 2021 A small retrospective of Ahn Jun’s work “About Gravity” is traveling around the world, based on the attempt to find beauty and meaning in the face of inevitability.
“You can come to terms with it and accept it or you can try to resist it,” said the Korean woman. “Most of us live somewhere in the middle.”
Prepared by CNN.
Tags: photographer South Korea captures breathtaking moments
-
