BLINDNESS (2024 work-in-progrress)
Blindness can take many forms. Physically, it is the affliction of being born sightless or losing sight later in life.
Figuratively, one might think of Milton’s darkness visible, which the poet uses to describe the hell which awaits Lucifer when he falls from grace.
Blindness can also be a self-inflicted punishment, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex who puts out his own eyes to atone for an unspeakable sin.
Saramago’s epic novel opens at a traffic light, where the first victim of a mysterious pandemic suddenly loses the ability to see. Chaos quickly ensues and then proceeds to engulf the city, bringing society to the very edge of cataclysm, only to lift again suddenly and inexplicably.
More broadly, blindness could refer to the human condition: to the ability to see but not comprehend. Think of a newly arrived immigrant unable to read or speak the language of her new home, trying desperately to navigate and adapt to a different culture.
In creating this body of work, I took steps to make my process more arduous and tentative than photography usually is, like a blind person stumbling in the dark. I first disabled - and at times modified - my equipment to strip away the advantage of its technological prowess; also I often worked in near darkness, where even the act of seeing became difficult. My lighting technique highlights the tactility of surfaces. Unlike a photographer, who builds meaning based on visual pattern, a blind person largely relies on the other senses to know the world.
This series is driven by the consciousness of a nameless drifter, making his way through the streets of Seoul. Every photograph is a question mark which makes him pause and consider an object up close, trying to decipher its meaning through such changing emotions as anxiety, curiosity, fear or desire.
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I could not ask for a more thoughtful introduction to myself and my series BLINDNESS, than the one written by Song Sujong, Senior Curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, in her weekly column for JoongAng Sunday.
“Blind City”
A vaguely defined place whose location is unclear. On top of a metal shelf used as a shoe rack, sheets of newspaper—the universal protective lining—have been spread out. Resting there, all alone, is a pair of dress shoes. Despite the creases formed by the wearer’s gait and the scuffed toes, the shoes shine, polished to a gloss like the determination of their owner, who continues to tend to his life. The pink lining attached to the heels forms a complementary contrast with a blue plastic box, creating a subtle, peculiar atmosphere. Perhaps it’s because of the strong impression left by Yun Heunggil’s novel The Man Who Was Left as Nine Pairs of Shoes. Somehow, dress shoes often carry a faint air of melancholy, like a symbol of Korean men enduring the weight of supporting a family. Is it right to ascribe so much meaning to a single pair of shoes whose owner we cannot even identify? We may not know the owner, but it seems clear that the scene in which the photographer encountered this lone pair of shoes held significance for him.
Jaime Permuth is a Guatemalan-born photographer based in New York. Even after marrying a Korean artist, he continued to live primarily in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, he and his family relocated to the outskirts of Seoul. For someone who had been highly active in New York, the move to Korea must have been a new challenge. One night, while wandering with his camera through Jongno, Euljiro, and Chungmuro, he came upon this pair of shoes at the corner of a building along the street. Standing before them, he may have been momentarily captivated by the sense of transience evoked by the cultural practice of removing one’s shoes indoors and the stale newspapers that hadn’t been replaced for a long time. The title of the series—his first body of work begun in Korea— is Blindness, signifying the inability to see. It is also a metaphor for the artist himself, positioned amid cultural differences. Having long focused on spaces and lives that exist outside the mainstream, Permuth placed himself in the condition of a foreigner and relied solely on instinctive visual perception to capture the nighttime urban landscapes. Like opening one’s eyes slowly in the dark, the longer you look, the sharper these scenes become.
— Song Sujong, Senior Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art