Soo Kim
Simon / Explosion, 2009
Hand-cut chromogenic print
30 x 30 inches
Courtesy Sandroni Rey Gallery
When I became pregnant, I had to revise the way I made work. Making photographs in the darkroom wasn’t possible anymore because of the fumes, the crouching, the lifting. I considered the way I had been making work and some of it seemed to be based on convention – how I thought an artistic practice using photography was structured. I was making discreet bodies of work made up of small editions of each image. But I began to consider why some bodies of work were made up of serial imagery while others weren’t. Why did images need to be in discreet groups – why not exist in one grouping and perhaps reappear in another? Why make editions of photograph instead of one unique image? Why photograph numerous iterations of an object or idea, a taxonomy of sorts, instead of photographing a single image?
When my daughter, Chaerim, was born, my sense of time as well as my actual time, the way my days were structured, were changed. I still couldn’t work in the darkroom (the fumes, the crouching, the lifting), and I was anxious to get back to making work. I had time to make work when Chaerim was sleeping. Lost was the significant length of time in studio, but gained was an experience of time that I never expected or could have structured for myself. I had always considered the picturing of time as an important component in my work, and now my experience of it had really changed radically. My first solo show after Chaerim was born was about the elongation of time in a photograph, about slowness essentially, and is a result of my daughter teaching me this. This idea that I thought I understood, but didn’t until she came along.