After the rain

After the rain, clearing skies, a sweetness to the morning breeze and a sparkling city that seemed reborn. A new day starting and full of promise.

We moved to Korea from NYC in Spring of 2021. The world was still in the throes of Covid and my physical health was at an all time low.

Before leaving Manhattan, I bought a cycling jersey and shorts. This was the humble promise I made to myself that I would get back in shape.

Things were so chaotic then that it was hard to find a bike, new or used. But when I finally did, my newly adoptive city began to open up to me in unexpected ways. I traced my own maps and found places that spoke and belonged to me alone.

Biking has meant so many things to me: strength and balance, freedom, adventure, belonging. I have nothing really to prove to myself, just a road of days that I want to follow and enjoy.

Walk away

Our boys are identical twins and they share just about everything and every moment of life.

But they do have very distinct personalities.

Here Luca is clearly fascinated by the surfers in Hajodae and waiting for a chance to make new friends.

Olin is just walking away ~

Always the last ones

Always the last ones to leave ~

Simple pleasures

Olin and Luca standing, transfixed, outside the local GS 25, while HRM pays for coffee ~

***

After a full day of hunting for crabs, fishing in the surf, digging out clams and chasing waves we had grilled meat for dinner from our favorite restaurant in Hajodae, which is owned by a butcher.

When we were done we walked over to the convenience store for a quick coffee.

The boys still had one last - insatiable - urge: finding praying mantes wherever they might be.

Such were the simple pleasures of our very busy summer season.

Only the perfect ones

Keep only the perfect prints;

tear up the rest ~

New Acqusition

One of my street photographs from Havana has a found its home at the new headquarters of the stellar architectural firm 100A.

We collaborated with 100A on the design and construction of Jaime Stay and will always be deeply grateful for their inspired, beautiful work.

Exhibition Opening “Love Letter and Library”

Gwanghapdan x GallerytheC

“Love Letter and Library”

8/7 thru 8/30

A collaborative exhibition of Artist Books and Zines with over 25 participating artists!

GallerytheC

서울특별시 용산구 임정로 35 2층

2nd floor, 35, Imjeong-ro yongsangu, seoul

Opening Hours

Tue - Sat : 11AM to 5PM

***

“광합단과 갤러리더씨가 함께 만드는

8월의 특별한 도서관”

누군가에게 닿기를 기다리는 마음들,

그 조용한 기록들이 책의 형태로 놓인 곳.

8월 한 달간 열리는 작은 도서관에

다양한 작가들의 손길로 엮인

아트북, 더미북, zine 등 60여 권이 모였습니다.

책마다 고유의 청구기호가 있으며,

누구든 짧은 러브레터를 남길 수 있습니다.

페이지 속 누군가의 마음을 열람하는

‘수신인’이 되어 주세요.

📚러브레터와 도서관 • Love Letter and Library

광합단 x 갤러리더씨

2025.8.7 — 8.30

💌 장소: 갤러리더씨(서울시 마포구 임정로 35, 2층)

🌻 시간: 화–토 12:00–18:00 (일·월 휴관)

🔖 광합단 북토크 (플레이리스트 여름호)

2025. 8.21 (목) 오후 5시

🔖 아티스트 개더링

2025. 8.30 (토) 오후 4시

Love Letter and Library

A fun and busy day installing our upcoming GallerytheC x Gwanghapdan exhibition of artist books and zines entitled “Love Letter and Library”.

After lunch, we also edited and assembled our soon to be released Fall Playlist ~

DIPF 2025 Catalogue

A beautifully realized catalogue is a great way to bring together the scope of a photo festival. That is surely the case for this year’s edition of the DongGang International Photo Festival ~

In a neighbor’s field

Yesterday, Olin woke up early, a full hour and a half before his usual time. I tried to help him get back to sleep. It was úseless. So instead, I proposed we go out for a walk together.

Olin was of course on the lookout for insects but instead we found a deer crouching in a neighbor’s field. As we got closer, the deer jumped out and tried to get away. But the poor thing was badly tangled in a mesh fence. I got closer and it allowed me to pry one of its hind hooves loose. But the rest of the legs were hopelessly caught in the mesh. Every time it jumped forward the rope cut deeper into its skin.

We ran back home so I could grab my pocket knife. We returned to the field and I carefully cut it loose. The deer took a few steps and pitched forward on the ground, badly hurt.

I then contacted the Town Hall. They said they would send someone over. What I didn’t know is that the town sees these deer as a problem for farmers and more often than not, they simply put them down where they find them.

The whole experience made an impression on me: the animal’s delicate head and beautiful coloring, its panic at feeling trapped, its grudging trust in me, the welts and open gashes on its skin, its feeble attempts to regain its footing.

I wish the ending could have been different.

The Dodge & Burn Interviews

Sometime in 2009, Qiana Mestrich reached out to me asking if I’d be interested in being interviewed for her blog “Dodge & Burn”. The interview, which appeared in September of that year is now featured in print together with an update of several follow-up questions from 2023.

Qiana’s blog zeroed in on individual artistic practices vis-a-vis an art world that was reluctant to embrace the vision of immigrants and artists of color. Reading Qiana’s posts one immediately felt a strong and unapologetic sense of advocacy, insisting on decolonizing the gaze of gatekeepers and fighting for greater diversity, equality and inclusion.

My interview from 15 years ago feels like a time capsule and I decided to keep it without alterations. Looking back, I feel that I’m often over-confident and naive and hungry like only young artists can be. I hope my postscript balances things out a bit better with the perspective and clarity of a long artistic career.

At any rate, dear Qiana, I salute your talent and tireless work. And I celebrate this publication with you. Its pages tell it like it is and are full of insight and inspiration. I am humbled and honored to be included in it alongside so many friends and colleagues I cherish and admire.

Rosalind Solomon, in memoriam

In the mid 90s, when I completed my MFA studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York, I went to work as a personal printer for some of the photographers I admired most at the time.

First for Patrick Demarchelier, working on his fine art exhibitions. Then I printed books and exhibitions for Lois Greenfield and subsequently for Gilles Peress. Soon after I had stopped working for Gilles - to focus on my own personal work - I got a call from him.

He explained that Rosalind Solomon had just returned from Johannesburg and needed help printing a portfolio. I confessed I didn’t know her work. Gilles said it might be an interesting experience for me to work on her images.

That was an understatement. To step into her world, to become intimate with her work, to spend time with the artist, it was all a revelation.

Rosalind came to photography later in life but she left an indelible mark on the medium. She was a true visionary and one of the most uncompromising artists I’ve ever met. She held herself - and all those she collaborated with - to the highest standards.

When the portfolio was done, we still kept in touch. Sometimes, if I was passing by her Astor Place studio I would ring her doorbell and come up to see her for a bit. Other times, I would bring a bottle of wine and settle in for a longer conversation.

In her later years, Rosalind became more and more interested in the human voice. She embraced both writing and performance as part of her practice.

What a legacy she leaves behind. And how sorely she will be missed.

Finalist DIPF

Thrilled to be a Finalist for this year’s DongGang International Photo Festival ~

Los pasos de sus dueños

Por supuesto, los libros cuentan las historias que llevan impresas en sus páginas. Pero muy a menudo recuerdan los pasos de sus dueños también.

En el 2009, viajé a Madrid para supervisar la impresión del libro “Julio Zadik, un fotógrafo moderno en Guatemala” en Gráficas Palermo. Llevaba conmigo “Travesuras de la niña mala” de Vargas Llosa, y al abrirlo aún conserva parte del boleto de Iberia que utilizaba de seña. Dieciséis años más tarde lo volví a leer en Corea y recordé tantas experiencias vividas en España, donde coincidentemente termina sus días el protagonista del libro.

Mi copia de “El hijo de casa” de Dante Liano contiene un recibo muy simple escrito a mano. El libro lo compré en Guatemala poco antes de viajar por primera vez a Cuba. Y leí su tenebroso relato en la Calle Neptuno en Centro Habana.

El recibo indica el costo de la estadía de siete noches en Casa Miriam y Sinaí, y está escrito de la mano de Miriam. No solo figura el costo de mi habitación sino la de varios de mis estudiantes que me acompañaban en el taller que impartí en esa ocasión.

Once años más tarde lo vuelvo a leer una vez más. Mis memorias de Cuba en ese primer viaje, se mezclan con el aire muy puro y las noches tranquilas del campo en Corea.

Preface

“Permuth’s world is wholly night. His night is not merely the absence of sunlight. It is a moment when reality sheds its skin and the truth beneath begins to emerge. Though documenting scenes of Cuba, Permuth transcends documentary realism. Referencing Milton’s “darkness visible,” he emphasizes blindness as a mode of perception. He makes visible the darkness within daylight and reveals the visible in the pitch-black night. The “majestic, aged, and crumbling landscape” of Havana’s old quarter unsettles and enthralls the artist, as noted in his statement. This emotional disorientation—where boundaries collapse—is daytime imbued with night. In Centro Habana, where open windows and doors erase the division between inside and outside, darkness gathers thick as ink between flickering streetlights. Glimpses of brightly lit interiors through open doors are at once outside and inside. For Permuth, everything is night—a space where the real and the unreal, clarity and delirium, despair and ecstasy coexist. He captures these fleeting nights in photographs.

Night is despair, and also hope. It is both destination and departure. Only by sleeping can we awaken; only by embracing night can we anticipate morning. The long journey into night is a black love, a descent into despair. Yet by accepting our fate and arriving at night, we begin to dream again.

Night is the detour of life”.

From Lev Ahn’s preface to the exhibition “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” @iseurrat Iseurrat Artroom.

Sebastiao Salgado, In Memoriam

There was a time in my life, around twelve or thirteen years of age, when my interest in photography started to deepen and become a passion. I treasured every roll of film in my camera and each frame counted. Seeing a contact sheet felt like reading pages from a diary because I had managed to stretch those 36 frames over a week or two, sometimes even longer.

Back then, I was open and susceptible in the way that only the youngest hearts can be. And the works of the great photographers, whom I had never met in person, were voices that whispered to me like the closest of friends.

Some were so mighty that I could hardly reconcile the fact that - like me - they worked with a camera. Could these be photographs too? Their images seemed to emanate from a higher and unattainable realm, even though they were firmly rooted in the same world I walked.

I encountered Sebastiao Salgado’s photography for the first time in the most unlikely way: a poster hung in a classroom of a woman and her children traversing a barren landscape in Africa. The figures were unevenly distributed over the field, and wrapped in coarse sheaths of cotton fabric. Only their faces were visible and they seemed exhausted and emaciated by their journey. They were walking together but in a fragile manner, at risk of falling apart. Overhead, the darkening dome of the sky glowed with delicate, compassionate and diaphanous light.

Even though I was on my way to meeting friends, it broke my stride. I don’t recall how long I gazed at it in silent wonder. There was a feeling of sacredness to the photograph and experiencing it was an epiphany that changed me forever. Over the years, it would be followed by others, just as powerful.

Sebastiao Salgado, you were and will always be an inspiration. I never thought of you as a journalist. I always considered you a poet. Farewell, and thank you for so much.

Upcoming exhibition at Iseurrat Artroom in Seoul

Save the date!

I am part of a three-person exhibition “Long Day’s Journey into Night” opening May 16th at Iseurrat Artroom in Seoul.

The exhibition will feature a dozen of my street photographs from Havana, as well as a selection of works by painters Jooyoung Park and Sera Jeong.

Broccoli (and fatherhood)

This past Friday, HRM was invited to give a talk at Raffaella Gallo’s ARTCaffè. One of the projects she referenced was her most recent body of work, The Hours Breathe.

The series is a deeply felt meditation on motherhood. Hearing her speak of those days brought back a flood of memories.

During the Q+A after the talk, an older man asked her a very perceptive question about how returning to Korea after spending so many years abroad had impacted her perceptions of her own country.

Later on, as the audience was dispersing, we had a chance to speak with him. He told us a very moving story. A week earlier, at home in Montreal, he got a telephone call from his son in Seoul. “Dad, what are you doing next weekend?”

“Nothing special, son”.

It turns out his daughter in law, who was also in the audience on Friday, was scheduled for surgery and his son flew him in for a few days to help care for his young grandson. For some reason, hearing the man tell his story almost brought me to tears.

And I haven’t been able to stop thinking of my own early days as a father.

Tonight, as I was doing the dishes after dinner, I suddenly had a vivid recollection of myself in the vegetable aisle at Harlem Whole Foods, with baby Luca strapped on to a backpack across my chest, carefully choosing the best broccoli I could find to puree for the twins at home.

God, there were some sleepless nights back then. And I remember being so bone-tired that I might as well have been sleep-walking through my life.

But what immeasurable joy filled our hearts as well.

Publication in Lente Cubano

Gracias Lisset Alonso Compte for including my work in this review of the exhibition “Expansión” at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam, published in the journal Lente Cubano.

Ingam Dojang

Today was a true rite of passage for me.

Having now lived in Korea for a few years, it suddenly became necessary for me to get an Ingam Dojang (인감도장) which is a registered personal seal or stamp used here to authenticate important legal documents, similar to a signature in Western contexts.

I chose a case for my seal decorated with the “Sipjangsaeng” the ten symbols of longevity. Sipjangsaeng (십장생) refers to the “Ten Symbols of Longevity” in Korean culture, a traditional motif representing eternal life, health, and happiness. The term combines “sip” (십), meaning “ten,” and “jangsaeng” (장생), meaning “long life.”

These symbols typically include the sun, mountains, water, clouds, pine trees, turtles, cranes, deer, bamboo, and plants of immortality.

With the help of a shop owner in nearby Hwado, we designed the seal. Given that I am not a Korean national, it was required to have my full name spelled out Western style. I only ever use my middle name “Enrique” in the context of official documents. And today was no exception.