
Self-Portrait
- Publisher
- Akaaka Art Publishing
- Year
- 2018
- ISBN
- 978-4-86541-087-7
- Specifications
- Hardcover with double jacket
364 x 233 mm
88 pages
Japanese / English / Korean
Art direction by Shin Akiyama (edition.nord)
The first photobook by Ahn Jun, a Seoul-based photographer who works internationally: a series of self-portraits made between 2008 and 2013 in Seoul, New York and Hong Kong. Images of Ahn looking down from rooftops and the edges of high-rise buildings are full of overpowering tension and a sense of floating in the air. To stand on a rooftop is, for her, to visualise the void between a past that cannot be changed and a city landscape that feels far away as the future, capturing the momentary fissure that is the present. It is both a performance that replaces time with space, possible only through photography, and an image isolated from its context. The view from a height across the city and the view of the void underfoot set visual and spatial cognition, life and death, ideal and reality against each other, and present a human existence on an edge; barefoot and ready to fly into an unseen world, she invites the viewer to the edge of the void.