Photographer offers personal images of poverty

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A photo exhibition at Silver Eye Center for Photography chronicles life in a slum outside Seoul, South Korea — and rejects the cruel cliches thatoften frame pictures of poverty.

The word “shantytown” evokes images of toothless beggars, skeletal big-eyed children and filthy huts that make poverty seem disgusting and alien. Soohyun Kim refuses to take these kinds of pictures. Instead, he celebrates the resourcefulness and resilience of the people of Guryong Village — where he once lived and his mother still does.

Mr.Kim was chosen as the winner of the 2018 International Prize in Fellowship 18, Silver Eye’s international juried photography competition. Tamsen Wojtanowski of Philadelphia won the Keystone Prize. Exhibitions of both photographers’ workopened in June and close Saturdayat the gallery in Bloomfield.

What makes Mr. Kim’s Guryong portraits so intimate and canny is the fact that these were his neighbors. For three years, he lived with his mother in the slum that borders the wealthy, stylish Gangnam district of Seoul.

Atthe time, he had little interest in photographing this village; he hardly saw it in daylight. His days were occupied by a low-paying photography apprenticeship and his evenings by tutoring children to make a livable income. He returned to the shantytownlate at night to sleep.

“I was not interested in talking about my private life,” the photographer said in a phone interview.

That changed when Mr. Kim came to the U.S. to seek a master’s degree in photography at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His adviser challenged him to “do something very personal,” so he started by making portraits of his mother.

The project that followed was both an artistic pursuit and an act of service. Many of the subjects of Mr. Kim’s portraits needed pictures for ID cards, or for funerals.

“Everywhere in Korea, they start