The teenagers in these black-and-white photographs do not shy away from the camera. Their ties hang loose. Their school uniforms have been altered to fit. In beanies or checked jackets, they look straight ahead as if it were nothing. These are the people in Sung Jin Park's new photobook, 《Kid Echo》. He met them in 2000s Seoul, in Shinsa-dong and Garibong, Cheongnyangni, Wangsimni and Myeong-dong.

The pictures are more than twenty years old. Yet they do more than record the fashions of a period. The people in the frame still stand as if they were waiting for someone, or about to slip out of the alley.

Left out in 2014

《Kid Echo》 is a 152-page hardcover published in September 2026 by Session Press, an independent photobook publisher in New York. Every photograph in it is being shown for the first time. Park shot them in the same years as his best-known work, 《Kid Nostalgia》 (2014), but they did not make it into that book.

The reason lay outside the pictures. In an interview with AnOther, Park said he judged that Seoul at the time might not accept these photographs as an 'appropriate' image of Korean teenagers. Publishing a book like this in Seoul back then was not easy either. The photographs were fine. The eyes to see them were not there yet.

A boy in a checked jacket, white shirt and black beanie leans against a wall, chin slightly raised, looking at the camera. The utility pole on the right is crowded with stickers listing phone numbers for moving and delivery trucks.
〈Shinsa-dong, 2001〉. Next to a pole covered in stickers for moving and delivery trucks, a student in a beanie lifts his chin a little. © Sung Jin Park, courtesy of Session Press

Making a uniform your own

In these pictures the school uniform makes everyone the same. It is also the material each student uses to show taste. Park remembers boys who wore their trousers wide like bell-bottoms, or took them in very tight. Some students in Gangnam reworked their uniforms in a hip-hop style. Around 2006 and 2007, girls began rolling up the waistbands of their long skirts to wear them like miniskirts. Inside the school gate, the hems had to come back down to the knee. Under the same rules, each student changed something small, and those small changes set the rhythm of the photographs.

Two boys stand in front of a restaurant in a Myeong-dong alley. Both wear white shirts and ties. The boy on the left has on wide black bell-bottoms. In front of them is a tall standing sign advertising yukgaejang and kalguksu.
〈Myeong-dong, 2006〉. The left student's trousers flare out toward the hem. A standing sign for yukgaejang and kalguksu stands in front. © Sung Jin Park, courtesy of Session Press

Still, Park does not file these kids away as specimens of a subculture. What he watched while shooting was less the uniform than the way it was worn. Posture, expression, a flash of tension in a glance. Session Press describes what Park found as 'emotional moments.' They differ from Henri Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment.' They do not complete a composition or close a story. They come closer to the presence a person shows once they relax in front of the lens.

Two girls lean against a white tiled wall. The one on the left wears a short-sleeved shirt, a plaid tie and a short plaid skirt with a lace hem. The one on the right wears a black dress with her shirt collar pulled out over it.
〈Wangsimni, 2008〉. Lace trims the hem of the left student's short plaid skirt. © Sung Jin Park, courtesy of Session Press

Black and white from a small darkroom

Park was born in Seoul and moved to New York as a teenager in 1987. He studied painting and photography at Pratt Institute. After returning to Korea, he walked Seoul and its outskirts and photographed the teenagers he met.

Why black and white? Park said it felt natural, and he liked that he could develop it himself, even in a small darkroom. He also sees black-and-white photography as 'not completely realistic.' He photographed signs, uniforms and alleys, but with the color removed, the pictures step aside from being a record of a particular year's customs. What remains is the brightness of faces, the texture of walls and fabric, the tonal range between different blacks.

That tonal range carries over to the paper. 《Kid Echo》, edited by Park himself, is printed on thick matte stock. 《Kid Nostalgia》 mixed in figures seen from behind, parts of bodies and street scenes. The new book stays with portraits of people facing the camera. Park chose the photographs with Miwa Susuda, who founded Session Press, and most are frontal portraits. Rather than skimming the 'youth culture' of an era, readers turn the pages meeting one pair of eyes at a time.

Two boys stand in front of a wall lined with election posters. The one on the left wears a short-sleeved school shirt. The one on the right wears a black T-shirt that reads
〈Garibong, 2006〉. In front of election posters full of smiling candidates, the two students do not smile. © Sung Jin Park, courtesy of Session Press

An edit that had to wait twenty years

What makes 《Kid Echo》 interesting is how old film reaches the present. The photographs drew a lukewarm response when they were taken. They came back out in late 2024 or early 2025, when Miwa Susuda got in touch. Park had kept the film instead of throwing it away, and both the publishing landscape and the way people look at teenagers had changed. The second book came out of those two things together.

That does not mean the pictures settle into a tidy social history made for today's eyes. Park says he was not consciously photographing symbols of modern Korean history. He simply saw the particular color of Seoul alongside a feeling of youth that repeats everywhere. The people in the photographs fit the label 'Korean teenagers of the 2000s,' and they are also bigger than it. In front of the camera, these teenagers knew how they would look. Within the clothes they were told to wear, they were shaping themselves.

A student seated in front of a rough cement wall looks straight at the camera. The bangs are cut blunt, and a black The North Face windbreaker is worn over a white T-shirt.
〈Cheongnyangni, 2007〉. From under blunt bangs, the student looks straight at the camera. A The North Face logo shows on the chest. © Sung Jin Park, courtesy of Session Press

Looking at these photographs again some twenty years on, Park said it felt as if he had been one of those kids. Now he looks at the pictures from the outside, like everyone else. Still, the growing pains of both the photographed and the photographer remain in them. 《Kid Echo》 does not stop at a nostalgia that wraps the past up neatly. It shows which faces were allowed to stand for an era, and which photographs were left out of the book. It also shows how the meaning of the past shifts when you unroll film you kept.

Book details

The cover of 《Kid Echo》. On a white ground sits a black-and-white photograph of two girls in school uniforms standing side by side. The girl on the left looks at the camera, and the girl on the right has an ice cream in her mouth. A vertical band on the left reads Kid Echo, Park Sung Jin, Session.
The cover of 《Kid Echo》. Design by Alex Lin (Studio Lin). © Sung Jin Park, courtesy of Session Press

For details and to buy the book, see the Session Press book page. The interview with Park is in AnOther.