Face Of The Day

Gannon Burgett explains the process behind Seung Hwan Oh’s project Impermanence:

[I]t’s a series of microbe-mauled portraits that hardly resemble what they were originally captured as. Seung-Hwan gets these results by immersing developed film into water and then adding in various collections of microbes. Over the course of a few weeks, months or years, the microbes destabilize and eat away at the silver halide particles in the emulsion. The final images are what remains of the organic process taking place, where the dyes and emulsion run off and change color over time.

Stephanie Chan comments:

It’s an interesting approach to photography that takes a normally still medium and adds a dimension of something active, live, and dynamic. When you view Oh’s photographs, the question is no longer the significance of what is depicted; instead, what catches your eye is the tension between what is shown and what is already lost. Though art is naturally created to be consumed, in this case, the art itself is the act of consumption, the parts of the photographs that have been literally eaten away by a relentless force of nature. The result, in Oh’s word, can be witnessed as something that is “entangled creation and destruction that inevitably is ephemeral”.

See more of Oh’s work here.