INA JANG
Since receiving her first camera over a decade ago, South Korean-born, New York-based photographer Ina Jang has become enraptured by the medium. In fact, when asked of her interests outside of photography, she pauses to reply “Even if I discover something remotely interesting, I eventually think about how it can be related to photography.”
“Since [receiving a camera], making images became an essential part of my life,” Jang elaborates. “For the first few years, I never stopped taking pictures of my surroundings. When I realised that I took pictures of everything I found, I started obsessively photographing my younger sister who lived with me in Tokyo at the time. Every shoot had a specific theme - it was not arbitrary anymore. Making those shoots happen was a huge gratification in my life,” she says. “Even now, I can say that some of my happiest moments are when I am making good photographs. Once I learned that photography was directly related to my happiness, I applied to SVA [School of Visual Arts] to study photography in New York.”
Growing up in South Korea, Jang’s parents encouraged her to travel the world, be curious and to keep an open mind. “Fundamentally, curiosity and desire drives me to produce images,” explains Jang. “Everything in life has shaped and inspired my work. There has been no distinction between my personal life and my work in the past decade. It seems natural to me that everything is intertwined.”
She ponders, “my work must have influenced my life, and vice versa. My photography is about my experience. It is just something I do to further my thoughts. Since I do not capture existing things, they need to be created by me first to be photographed. The whole experience starts from drawing an idea, getting the materials to construct the image to capture, then finishing it by printing onto
paper. It’s the entire process that matters to me.”
Jang describes her work as minimal, serene and playful, colour, shape and depth operating as an intrinsic part of her work. An observer could also reflect on the continuous theme of the distorted self - faces obscured, obstructed, or missing completely. As Jang explains, “my position in making photographs is not to document, but to express my ideas. At a certain level, I'd like to think that it is a struggle to show more of the image maker [myself] than the subject in the work. On top of that very reason, I think concealed identity gives certain room for the viewers to relate to the images easily. It becomes universal.”
Despite her impressively sculptural and intriguingly framed shots, Jang confesses that her techniques arose more from trial and error. “I shamefully admit that I am not a very technical photographer. Lighting and equipment are the least of my concerns when I make images, so I don't know if I developed a special technique at all. If anything, my only technique is making setups on my own. Everything in the photographs is carefully prepared and precisely composed.”
Jang’s recent series ‘In a World Without Words’ is full of intriguing juxtapositions - soft muted pastel colours provide a backdrop to harsh collage-esque cuts, sculptural forms and unexpected household objects. “The title came to me as I was never very good at explaining what I do as a photographer,” says Jang. “I hoped that the title itself could explain what I was trying to convey throughout the series. The world in my work is quiet and careful. They do not represent specific ideas or agendas. They are just images, and words do not exist in them.
“It is difficult for me to just focus on one idea to develop a series,” Jang continues. “I get easily bored by following one thing at a time, but my focus is on believing my sensibility. By relying on what makes me curious, I start drawing or writing about certain shapes, colours and sometimes very specific scenarios to photograph. Then there is a huge amount of time spent on finding perfect objects, backdrops and models to photograph. Connecting dots among these ideas is the most important step in making a body of work.”
On her future plans, Jang reflects “Lately, I've been spending more time on my personal projects. There are so many ideas that have not been photographed yet, so I am quite behind my own schedule at the moment. I don't know what is going to happen in the future, but I will be making lots of work. That's one thing I know.”
Images courtesy of Ina Jang
Published in PITCH Present, November 2014