Tresses, Hadong, 1993

Portraits by CHU Myungduck (1940- ) are parts of his photo-essays produced in the 1960s and onward when he was working at a magazine publisher: The Scenes of Masterworks, Home to Great Poems, Silver-Haired Koreans, and Metaphors of Korea. For Chu the human figures are valued not as the subjects for representation but as both the portraits and documents of the times. In particular, his attitude in approaching a figure is characterized by some degrees of distantiation and balance, in other words, by the ability to tell the history of an individual by adopting the most possible distance and color scheme in capturing the image of the subject.