New addition to post #1: 유별남, South Korea.
This gentleman is making a series called Walking with a Large Format Camera, for which he uses a Graflex Crown Graphic and a handheld 6x12. The walks are on South Korea's largest island, Jeju Island, part of which is a World Heritage Site due to volcanic features. However, that's not why he does the walks. His family is from Jeju, and the walks are about an uprising on Jeju just before the Korean War. Earlier this month, he posted a video that includes an English explanation of the series. In the phrase "Jeju 4.3 Massacre", 4.3 refers to April 3, 1948. As I understand it, a "bitgae" was a teenage boy who was posted as a lookout during the uprising. In 2003, after decades of suppressing the very existence of the uprising, the South Korean President apologised to Jeju Islanders:
I was born in Jeju Island, but have not lived in Jeju since my family moved to the mainland when I was young. I lived in Busan, speaking the Busan dialect, and also in Seoul, using the Seoul dialect. I lived as a person on the mainland. What’s fortunate was that I spent every vacation at my grandpa’s home in Jeju when I was young. To me, Jeju Island was something to boast to others that it was my hometown, but with only fragments of memories.
During a summer vacation in middle school, I discovered a piece of paper with the words ‘Jeju 4.3 Massacre,’ while rolling a huge mandarin on the floor of my grandpa’s house. I took it to my grandpa and asked, “What is this?” Then, Grandpa caned me a lot and I ran away from the house. When I was fuming, shedding tears of resentment, Grandma came over to fetch me. Grandma repeatedly asked me to not talk about it ever again, and gave me chilled cucumber salad.
My parents were born during the Jeju 4.3 Massacre. I have no idea how they went through such chaos under those kinds of circumstances, but I guess I was able to exist since they made it through the turbulent times. I have never been told about the Jeju massacre from my parents. They may have nothing to say since they were also too young to remember those days, anyway. So we lived pretending to know nothing, but at some point I started to question. Why we have many relatives in Japan, why we also have relatives in North Korea, why Grandpa has such severe conflicts with some other relatives, what the guilt-by-association system is....
While I was getting answers to those questions one by one, the true nature of something that could not be discussed for a long time was slowly revealed. I had to do something, anything. I took my camera, searching for stories of seventy years ago here and there. The ‘site’ is more important than anything else in documentary photographs, but there was nowhere left. Even if I took pictures of the graves and monuments for the pain, the damaged districts (though the whole of Jeju Island may be the damaged districts), or the faces of the survivors (though all of the Jeju residents may be the survivors) in black and white photographs, they were not the ‘site’ anyway. It just felt obstinate even to express that I hear the cry in the past from the wind and feel the sorrow from the sound of the waves. Time and agony lengthened and deepened as such.
Then I found a way to walk into the scenery of the past myself. That is how the work for Bitgae began. A Bitgae who kept watch all day long must have started a day with alarm, on a hill or at a corner of a road, holding a horn in one hand and a boiled potato in the other hand.... The boy’s time, which began with anxiety, must have turned into boredom and annoyance. Or sometimes he must have looked around the surroundings with curiosity, wondering at the scene in front of him. I wanted to look at the scenery in front of me with such emotion by becoming a Bitgae myself. No, that was the only way for me.
Wikipedia:
Jeju Island
Jeju Uprising
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