When you learn photography, the first things you hear are what not to do. Keep the horizon level. Don't miss focus. Don't crop people awkwardly. Lee Gap-chul's photographs walk straight through that list on purpose. And yet, out of all that shaking, a Korean face emerges that stays with you longer than any neatly explained scene.

Look at the two pictures above. The old man on the left throws his head back and shouts. The camera has pushed in right under his chin and looks up at his face. In the photograph on the right the whole horizon has tipped over, and at the edge of the frame a hand in a white sleeve rises in a smear. The pictures don't tell you what the occasion is or where it is. What reaches you first is the sound and the wind of that place.

It started on the street

Lee Gap-chul was born in 1959 in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province, and grew up in Jinju. He graduated from the photography department of Shingu College in 1984. If you remember him only as a photographer of shamanism and ritual, you know half the story. His early work was on the streets of the city.

There is 《Jeju-1980》 (제주-천구백팔십), shot on Jeju from 1979 to 1984, and 《Yankees on the Street》 (거리의 양키들) from 1984, set on streets frequented by US Forces Korea soldiers. Then came 《Images of the City》 (도시의 이미지), which looked at relationships between people and between people and structures in the city, followed from 1985 to 1990 by 《Strangers' Land》 (타인의 땅), on inequality and alienation in this country. The title carries the air of a time when your own land felt like someone else's.

Black-and-white street photograph. In the middle of a road lined with riot police in padded helmets holding shields, a person wearing a mask with glasses and what looks like a white beard sits on a bicycle and looks straight at the camera. Behind are cars, a building entrance and onlookers.
Early city work. A masked figure on a bicycle looks our way from the middle of a road lined with riot police. ⓒ Lee Gap-chul · Image: K-ARTIST
Black-and-white photograph of the city reflected in a shop window. Several televisions on display show the same close-up of lips, while buildings and signs across the street are reflected over them in the glass. A child stands in front of the display at lower left.
Early city work. The same lips fill every television in the window, with the street opposite layered over them in the glass. ⓒ Lee Gap-chul · Image: K-ARTIST

Even in these years the frame is never quite straight. People are caught and cut off at the edges, and two or three layers of street pile up in a window. The tilted frames and rough surfaces did not appear out of nowhere in the ritual pictures. First came an instinct for catching the unease of unfamiliar streets.

Black-and-white photograph of a narrow alley. A small, nearly barefoot child, seen from behind, reaches toward a black balloon, with another child standing in front. At the far left, the legs of an adult in slippers are cut off by the frame.
A child in an alley reaches for a black balloon. Only an adult's legs make it into the frame. ⓒ Lee Gap-chul · Image: Marie Claire Korea

《Conflict and Reaction》

In 1990 Lee began 《Conflict and Reaction》 (충돌과 반동). He sought out traditional events and photographed shamanic rites (gut), funerals, ancestral rites, the first full moon festival (Daeboreum) and the rituals of farming communities. The work continued from the 1990s into the early 2000s and became the series he is best known for.

By subject alone it sounds like folk documentation. But the pictures are not tidy like a record. Few frames show at a glance who is doing what. The frame tilts, people are cut off at the edges, and black shadow eats half the picture. What the photographs hold is less the procedure of a ritual than the pressure of the moment when body, land and ritual collide. Feelings that barely translate, like han (deep, lingering sorrow) and sinmyeong (ecstatic joy), rise up out of that pressure.

Black-and-white photograph. A person in a white headscarf and white clothes, with eyebrows, a beard and cheek spots painted on in black, stands close to the camera. The face is out of focus and hazy, while the ridgeline behind is sharp.
From 《Conflict and Reaction》. The focus misses the face and lands on the mountain behind. The painted face floats in a haze. ⓒ Lee Gap-chul · Image: K-ARTIST

Why so much shake?

If you shoot film, your first thought looking at these might be: mistakes. The horizon is off, the focus is somewhere else entirely, the grain is coarse. But this is not an accident in one or two frames. It repeats across the entire series.

In the picture above, the focus slides past the person's face and lands on the mountain behind. The face is left as a shape, and the mountain is crisp. As information, the photograph is upside down. Yet that hazy face starts to look like something other than a person. Black and white pushes the same way. Strip out color and the explanations go with it, the patterns on clothes, the color of the sky, until only masses of light and dark remain.

The rules of a good photograph exist to make a scene easy to recognize. Lee's photographs put recognition off. In the meantime, the viewer's body reacts first. The frame keeps tilting and shaking, and yet the feeling lands, strangely, with more precision.

A photobook with a white cover. A single black-and-white photograph is mounted in the center: an old man in white stands before a tilted sea while a hand rises in a blur from the right. Below, Lee Gap Chul is written in red.
The photobook 《Conflict and Reaction》. The cover uses the right-hand picture from the pair at the top of this article. ⓒ Lee Gap-chul · Image: shashasha

From people to land

After 《Conflict and Reaction》, Lee stepped back a little from human ritual. In 《Gi (氣) / Energy》 he looked for an invisible energy in mountains, wind and trees, in the land itself. Even where people have left the frame, the shaking remains.

Black-and-white photograph. A white cloth densely covered in writing is tied to the tip of a thin branch and streams sideways in the wind. The end of the cloth blurs with motion, and dry grass heads lean in a blur at left.
From 《Gi (氣) / Energy》. A white cloth covered in writing smears in the wind at the end of a branch. ⓒ Lee Gap-chul · Image: K-ARTIST

With 《적막강산-도시 징후》 (Desolate Land: Signs of the City), shown in 2019 at the Museum of Photography, Seoul's Samcheong annex, he returned to the city. This time the dark, shaken sensibility turned to the symptoms of urban life. In December 2025, 《이갑철 다른 풍경론 1979-2000》 (Lee Gap-chul: Another Theory of Landscape 1979-2000) brought his work from 1979 to 2000 together again.

Why look again now

Phone cameras level the horizon for you, erase shake for you and brighten the dark for you. Sharp pictures have never been so common. But how many of them do we remember for long?

Rather than explaining an event, Lee's photographs leave behind the temperature of the place it passed through. What is Korean in them is closer to a pressure than a subject. Feelings that resist explanation keep pushing in from beyond the edges of the frame. If you have ever stood with a film camera, hesitating between the horizon and the focus, these pictures are worth a second thought about that hesitation.