한국어 번역이 준비중입니다. 기다려주세요.

Our site’s street photography has been selected to be included in an exhibit at Harvard University, put on by a group from the Graduate School of Design. The exhibit is called “Pop! Contemporary fashion and film subcultures in Asia” and in their own words:

…will focus on informal and non-traditional design through explorations of popular culture, cross-disciplinary interactions, and new forms of media. For this exhibit, we will examine the intersection of art, technology, and design through an event focusing on street fashion in a few of the most exciting cities in Asia: Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, Hanoi, Dubai, Mumbai, Istanbul and Tehran. We hope to push beyond the formal boundaries of design by exhibiting images and objects collected by bloggers, the social anthropologists of our generation. By mining the work of this geographically diverse group, we hope to convey to our audience the rich variety and complexity of urban life across Asia.

Apparently, they choose one representative for each region — and we’re it! We are definitely going to participate, and are flattered to have made the cut in this way. I think I understand what they mean by fashion documentation as “social anthropology” — that’s very much a big element of my approach to street fashion photography. In my mind, it’s about 1) photographically interesting clothes, 2) styles that are somehow either representative or fashionable in themselves, and 3) documenting not just the people but the physical spaces they inhabit, especially as they represent the character of specific neighborhoods in Seoul. I’m glad that some really smart folks out there (our faithful readers are in this category, of course!) seem to value these aspects of our approach to documentation.

When this site was younger, people always asked about the site’s name, our photographic approach, and why I even started it in the first place. I always answered that it was really just an experiment in fetish and photography that I started with no particular place to go. Still, I knew it would take me somewhere interesting; I didn’t plan on taking pictures of feet and legs and whatnot forever. To me, it was like an art project that started with a quirky theme, and would develop into different directions later. I had anough faith in myself as a photographer at that point (2006) to know I’d end up somewhere interesting if I had started somewhere interesting.

This entire project has always been a process, and I consider the entire arc of where we started to where we’ve come an essential part of the story. People have asked me why I haven’t erased the early part of the site — it’s “embarrassing,” they say, or it’s just “foot fetish” stuff. But I ask the question: “What’s embarrassing about being a heterosexual man and finding parts of a woman’s body attractive?”

In terms of the heterosexual “male gaze“, one that supposedly objectifies women into their constituent parts: a beautiful face, graceful neck, supple shoulders, slender arms, delicate hands, ample breasts, hourglass waist, curvaceous hips, firm thighs, and slim and slender legs — if one starts “from the ground up” with attractive feet and heels and moves right back up the ladder, is one somehow a “pervert?” And as a photo experiment that is informed by the legal need to not show people’s faces —  as well as the quirky name and acknowledgment of a “foot fetish” only insofar as women themselves obsess over pedicures, Manolo Blahniks, and how they’d look in this season’s sexy sandals — how is the watcher more “perverted” than the one putting on the show, again?

That’s why I could never erase the first couple months of posts on this site (despite people teasing me for it, or thinking negatively about the name) — because you can’t forget about the past, especially since it’s such an essential part of who we are in the present. And I see it like this — photography with a dash of fetish is far more interesting than the vanilla pictures that increasingly infect the internet. To me, “fetish” is simply “feeling” — and photography with feeling is always better. What you might see in my (FMS) photography is that I simply stopped apologizing for having a “male gaze” and instead admitted that I have one. And then I harnessed it. I used it to find interesting camera angles, to push myself past the natural hesitation people have about approaching total strangers on the street to take pictures, and to flatter the many subjects who want to be objectified, seen as sexy, or thought otherwise attractive.

“But you’re objectifying/sexualizing the subject in that shot!”

Yawn. Yeah, but so would most photographers. I simply admit use the natural instincts that I have to take the picture I want. I’ll rethink it or feel guilty about it or over-analyze it later. In that minute or two I have to take her portrait, I realize that the front slit in her skirt is sort of the point of her look, right? That’s where the eye is drawn, that’s where she wants it to go. Otherwise, why proudly wear such an usual skirt? So let’s look up a bit, let’s have her look down at me, let’s get the bright and colorful lights and reflections in the background, let’s make her look tall and powerful. Crossing her legs actually brings more attention to the fact that there’s something she’s hiding, and me shooting from below surely makes her more cognizant of that fact. There’s an unspoken tension hovering in the picture (between the viewer and the subject) about the fact that, indeed, “X marks the spot.” No, it is no accident that her crotch is smack in the center of the frame. I didn’t think about it when composing or even cropping after-the-fact; it just looked “right” that way. Maybe all this analysis sounds crude, but that’s one of the many things going on photographically in this shot, that’s how photos work, and what makes real photography with “feeling” (or you can say “fetish”) truly fun.

So, again, if you pointed out that it was my heterosexual male gaze that guided the way I set up this shot — good! You get an “A.” And again, this begs the question — So? What is wrong with possessing a heterosexual “male gaze” if indeed, you are (*GASP*) a heterosexual male photographer? That gaze is going to be there anyway — so trying to use it makes for much more honest pictures than artificially (and all too obviously) trying to act as if it’s not there at all. Because you’re going to feel it there, anyway.

So? We’ve come from the “fetish” in FMS photography being taken straight in a shot glass to that hard liquor being mixed in with other concerns: trends, style, and much thought given to the formal aspects of portrait photography, in addition to a little bit of social anthropology.

Since the beginning of Feetmanseoul.com, we’ve also tried to brand ourselves, and that brand has taken on real meaning from the early days when the site’s name was just an inside joke (a variation on a popular expat food blog called “Fat Man Seoul”) and an excuse to play with my new DSLR in 2006 after having abandoned film for digital; now, we’ve claimed the name as signifying “fashion from the ground up” and the Korean meaning of someone who knows many people and places as “having wide feet.” The site’s name now connotes being on one’s feet, out on the street, and having a “beat” that we cover. Whether or not that was there at the beginning, that’s the direction into which we grew.

But it still also harkens back to the original connotation of fetish that a “feetman” would be thought to possess. The way I’ve always explained the street fashion pictures taken by FMS has been in terms of being edgy, about not apologizing for admitting a sexual desire for the subject, for admitting an engagement with objectification in terms of what has Laura Mulvey has famously called “fetishistic scopophilia.” Some prissy folks who turn up their noses and employ the extremely negative term Konglish “페티쉬” (”pe-ti-shi” as a recent term only a few years old and used to describe only a genre of pornography, and eschewing any of the broader meaning as a psychological concept) are rightly picking up on all these things: “Aren’t your pictures too sexy?”

Yep. And that’s what defines the difference between the shots I like as a heavily-spiked cocktail with punch, as opposed to a virgin Gold Medalist that is safe, fruity, and drearily boring. Sure, maybe at the beginning of this site, the FMS pictures were a little too much to drink straight from the bottle and perhaps bit hard to swallow, but we’ve come a long way since then, and seem to be making photographic cocktails that some people obviously like — see, the trick, we’ve found, is in not watering our shit down.

So as we continue to develop content here, we’re going to use this nod of affirmation not to rest on our laurels, but to keep things fresh, edgy, and unapologetic about recording what we like, how we like, for the reasons we like. And as long as we do that while paying attention to the formal and technical aspects of our art, I think we’ll never end up serving saccharine sweet “girly” drinks here without any punch, but stuff that is arresting, powerful, and something you would actually want to serve to your friends.