The Long View: Jungjin Lee’s Unnamed Road

The Great Leap Sideways

by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

Jungjin Lee’s prints in Unnamed Road are made in a lengthy and somewhat repetitive process. Each original negative is printed large in the darkroom on paper coated in silver nitrate emulsion, then scanned to produce a secondary digital file, which is reworked to extend and refine contrast unattainable in the original print. This reworked file is then converted into a secondary negative, from which a final print is made on mulberry paper.

I summarise this process at the outset to contextualise the temporal effect of her delicate reproductions, which sit on the pages of her book like tear-streaked parchments, seemingly caught in the steady process of irreversible dissolution. The limited range of contrast available in the early phases of Lee’s printing process seems to produce an effect in which two-dimensional photographic texture strains to reach the surface of a paper full of subtle variations. The combined effect of these multiple layers, as one leafs through the Leporello-bound pages of her book, is that of a picture floating briefly beneath the meniscus of some watery solution.

"On the most ambitious scale in the history of the world, the ancestors of the Old Testament made virtue of their homelessness. They struck a gold vein of moral analysis by assimilating certain themes of transience from genuine nomads while rejecting their fatalism. In a Semitic storm god they found a traveling deity who was everyplace and therefore not bound by location. Owning nothing, they created a theology of contingent divinity and heroic escape."
— Paul Shephard, Nature and Madness(1982)

The desert, then, seems an extraordinarily appropriate place in which to make photographs such as these, since it is a layered place made up of endlessly shifting surfaces, a place which condenses millennial spans of time in indistinct but palpable ways. The desert reflects the vast extension of time in registers and periods for which we may have names, but on which we have precious little intuitive grasp. Whilst Lee’s images recall the ageing textures of salt paper prints, they simultaneously establish a visceral sense of an ancient, intricate web of gradual transformations, which we sense are at play in the vast and uninhabited depths of the Negev desert.

The vast majority of Lee’s photographs in Unnamed Road verge on a panoramic letterbox format, and they spread evenly and openly across both sides of each accordion-like double spread. The photographs themselves, however, are not panoramic in their aspect, but merely in their cropped concision, so that their framing of space resembles the proportions of ocular vision, rather than the distorted breadth of a super-wide angle lens. This has the effect of transforming the shortness of the vertical axis, and the generous breadth of the horizontal into a sort of arrowslit or loophole. Thus through her pictures we can gaze out of an expansive yet diminutive frame into the delicately foreshortened space of her ghostly landscape images.

In them we see irregular rows of tombstones shaped like tablets, their faces upturned to the bright sun. We see serried ranks of rock formations shouldering their way gradually through a permeable veil of pebbled soil. We see birds perched on telegraph lines like arpeggios stencilled on a chalkboard, wiped clean and papered over, buffed and then sanded over once again, in a spiralling cycle of the image’s dissolution toward the blankness of pure light.

Eduardo Cadava writes that “the image allows itself to be experienced only as what withdraws from experience. Its experience – and if it were different it would not be an experience at all – is an impossibility of experience.” Such are the paradoxical contradictions woven together in these pictures in an interplay between substance and form: the image as a means to embody an absence, which we can experience viscerally but with limited powers, precisely because its subject is no longer there. The aptness of this subtle and poetic way of working to this region is that it invokes the presence of powerful and yet intangible forces, which have competed over centuries in violently shaping the differentiated freedoms open to those who presently live in this place.

Lee’s pictures are not without a vocabulary for such violence, albeit they resist any temptation to inscribe in her way of a seeing a specific hierarchy of protagonists. They eschew the specificity of captions, as well as any discernible proxy form for identity groups or political ideologies. They do away almost comprehensively with overt pictorial allusions to identifiable parties in a generational war.

This has the effect of heightening the symbolic weight of coiled barbed wire fencing, or the comparative distinctions between one form of cemetery and another. But in those few images where specifically contemporary figures do arise, Lee’s photographs suggest the cacophonous density of millions of invisible people, clustered under the weight of a heavy sun in the immeasurable vastness of an indifferent desert. Lee’s photographs fall back upon a scale of time against which even present struggles will ultimately seem momentary and indecipherable. In her pictures, fragments of photographic time transform the present into a ghostly intimation of deep history. Her pictures evoke the twin figures of togetherness and emptiness with nuanced sensitivity, but they are measured in this beautiful work on the basis of the long view.