Jungjin Lee: A Reckoning

For Jungjin Lee, preparing herself for a photographic expedition consists of emptying. Emptying herself of thoughts, emptying herself of plans, emptying herself of expectations… Her photographic process embraces instinct and feeling, allowing her full and unadulterated encounters with the natural world. This surrender during capture is balanced by her endurance in the darkroom: working with traditional mulberry paper that she hand brushes with emulsion, she again clears her mind to embrace the processes of developing. Rolling waves of persistence and release, she creates stunning prints entangled with both serenity and emotive force. 

Each photo expresses her mind as much as the site. Lee’s experiences with the American Southwestern desert in the 1990s were what first allowed her to find her inner self in the vastness of the landscape. Her pictures capture the intensity of the setting—not through memorialising sublimity, but instead through expressing the dynamism of a place that both strips you of your sense of self while also making you present in your being. The reckoning of this self-realisation and the emotions borne of her interactions with the open landscape is what she aims to document: this reflection of her own unconscious self that is within and shared by the forms of the earth. 

Peering into herself through taking in the sky, the snow, the ocean, her photographs are akin to self-portraits. By capturing these places of pause and reflection, Lee invites viewers to recognise her emotions expressed through the deep blacks that cut across the white paper. And by finding her within the landscape, she hopes that viewers too will see themselves, a single snapshot that becomes a portrait shared by Lee, an onlooker, and also the earth. Each encounter with her prints exposes the universalities of emotions and interactions that man has with the natural world. 

Her recent works from Iceland focus on stripping back photographic explanations and embracing reduction, creating almost calligraphic or painterly expressions. The rich textures of the mulberry paper and the sweeping strokes of the hand-painted emulsion are juxtaposed against the sharpness of the silver-halides bloomed across the composition; the potent energy and stillness of each landscape can barely be contained within her prints, creating a raw, reverberant beauty that calls to each passerby and invites them to linger. 

Looking at Unseen, #10, the typical photographic notions of point of view, placeness, and temporality are erased. The volcanic rocks stain against the white snow, an image distilled away from details that have now become superfluous in comparison to the palpable depth and density of Lee’s emotional experience.

The waves, rocks, and plains of Iceland give command to the natural landscape—as if capturing the powerful forces that once sculpted the land’s topography. It’s as if the glacial bay of Unseen, #35 had just been carved away, with the great masses of ice having only just dissipated and the waters now rushing to fill its place. These ancient forces are almost visible, felt even stronger through their absence. Each photo feels alive—landscapes that are empty, but not barren, rife with a magnificent and absolute presence. It’s exactly this presence that brings human and land into one; a resonance of emotions and vitality captured poignantly within Lee’s photographs