Inside and Outside the Frame, Photographer Lee Sun-Min

Younha Choi

Photographer Lee, Sun-Min is full of wisdom. She stays within the frame but chooses subject matters that people outside the frame can fully understand. With such subjects, she continues to pursue her photo journey. From "Woman's House" to "Dogye Project," she has found certain universality of feminine consciousness and experience within Korea's family structure.

In her early project, "The Golden Helmet," Lee chose the man of power, Gaius Julius Caesar who grabbed the whole Rome in his hands. Through the tumultuous 1980s, Lee had experienced the president's assassination and the military coup in Korea. Such incidents had left her in doubts on power. She had poured out her energy into the project from casting and setting to shooting. After two year's effort, she excelled the project with a play actor in self-made sets.

After the Golden Helmet project, she had gone through changes in her life from marriage to childbirth. As she joined the marriage system, she could not but to experience the Korea's patriarchy. Between a woman and a mother, she had much thought on her role. Lee wanted to find a subject that anyone could easily understand. That was how her project "Woman's House" started. Even though her pictures seem too personal sometimes, they include Korea's patriarchal system. In her "Woman's House II," Lee tried to redefine the role of family and the meaning of woman's role and status within the extended family.

In her project, "Twins," Lee illustrated seemingly beautiful and prosperous lives of middle class in Korea. She tried to tell the materialistic vanity in child education through various adornments, expensive furniture, costly clothes, and etc. At the same time, she did not forget to express the warm side of women and mothers. In her photographs, little daughters were expressed as the successors of suppression and bleak childhood of their mothers. Issues of postindustrial society, consumer society and ideology of desire were all included in her works.

Meanwhile, in her next project, she illustrates lives of Dogye. The mining town has traces of modernization. Many people still make their living with mining. When photographers wanted to record people there, most of them focused on mining field and how they worked. However, Lee tried to record miners' everyday lives with their families.

Her journey of seeking new stories never ends. Beyond the boundary of women within the patriarchy, she now moves to various family cultures and lives in Korea. In its Korean meaning, the word "household" includes a way of life to protect families from death. Photographer Lee Sun-min truly is an ecofeminist who tries to keep a household through her unique photographs.