I have to admit I had never heard of Johsel Namkung before. My curiosity was picked after I heard that his 1978 exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum was what made Art Wolfe realize that nature photography could be art - an event he evokes in his foreword.
"Johsel Namkung: a retrospective" is, as implied by the title, a long-due retrospective book of the work of this little-known Korean-American master, published by Cosgrove Editions. The production is absolutely first-rate, making it one of the most impressive books of color photography I have seen (I've seen many). It clearly surpasses Cosgrove's previous efforts, such as Art Wolfe's superbly produced "Edge of the Earth, Corner of the Sky". For the publisher, Dick Busher - a polymath in the photography world, having assumed many roles, and a long-time friend of Namkung - it was clearly a labor of love, in which he spared no expenses. The book's high price ($175 for the trade edition) is not unreasonable considering the production quality and small run. This is a very large color book of size 16.5" x 13.25", which weights six pounds and half - for comparison, Alec Soth's "Looking for Love, 1996", a book with undistinguished black and white printing, which is 3 times smaller, 2 times thinner, and weights less than a pound was $50 (it sold out in a few months). The great printing quality and the large trim size was necessary to do justice to the beautiful and finely textured photographs.
Although he chooses very simple subjects - often to the point of being mundane -, Namkung reveals a wealth of detail in his photographs. Using a large format camera, Namkung was among the first contemporary photographers (before Robert Glenn Ketchum) to explore print scale, as he felt that prints had to be large enough to compete with paintings. Over the course of an amazingly rich and varied life - which he recalls in a delightful account in the beginning of the book - he was deeply influenced by other arts. Like Ansel Adams with whom he studied, he came to photography from a background in music, having performed as an acclaimed tenor specializing in German lieder until his 40s. He also befriended many of the artists of the Northwest School such as Mark Tobey. We can see the product of those influences in his focus on texture, repetitive but differentiated elements, rhythm of lines, as well as in his marked preference for abstraction.
Namkung made repeated visits to Steptoe Butte in the Palouse before it became the popular destination it is today, however, unlike in most photographs of that location, he preferred very soft light, even overcast, which resulted in a flat, more abstract and painterly picture plane. When looking at the captions of the images in the book, one can recognize names of National Parks locations now familiar to many nature photographers such as Wonder Lake (Denali NP) Picture Lake (North Cascades NP), Second Beach (Olympic NP). Yet it would have been impossible to identify those locations from the photographs alone, for Namkung has uncompromisingly framed just patches of grasses, water, or sand that could be found at many other places. The details that Namkung chose to photograph belie his extensive wilderness travels - he made half a dozen trips to Alaska.
Eliot Porter worte "Sometimes you can tell a large story with a tiny subject". Although Namkung's work bears many common traits with Porter's, his compositions are more rythmic, less representational, and his goals are distinctively different, as he comments: "I like to give my viewers questions, not answers". With the exception of two images from the earlier years of his career, all photographs in the book are close-ups, intimate landscapes, or larger scenes devoid of horizon. You can appreciate the precision of his composition when you compare the two crops that open the book with their full-frame counterparts (page 137 and 37 respectively). Although the crops are just missing about an inch around, the composition in them looks way less balanced to me, which meant that there was nothing else to take away from the original, a sure sign of perfection.
All the spreads of the book can be browsed on the website http://johselnamkung.net
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