Museum director in quest for undiscovered jewel photos

Song Young-sook / Korea Times file

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Great photos have a lasting impact on people. This belief has motivated Song Young-sook to spend the last five decades discovering great, unknown photos from all over the world, and since 2003 she has showcased them.

Song, chief director of the privately owned Museum of Photography in Seoul, said that there are no words that can accurately describe the thrill that she feels whenever she discovers unknown but great photos in unexpected places.

“To me, great photos are the ones that are conscious and ethical. They feature the objects as they are, without any intervention from photographers,” Song said at the museum on Thursday. She has taken photos since she went to university in the 1960s. Song, 67, mentioned an uneducated Swedish truck driver whose works were showcased at her museum years ago, as one of the great photographers she had ever met.

She accidentally dropped by a small exhibition at a warehouse in Austria during a business trip to Europe several years ago.

The exhibition showcased the then-amateur Swedish artist’s photos featuring the marginalized lives of illegal immigrants living in a border town in his country.

“His photos were so moving. So I decided to have the exhibition at our museum in Seoul,” she said.

“The Swedish photographer was so shy, and had no skills to express his emotions and feelings in great detail, when he met Korean critics.”

Song said that the Swedish photographer, whose name she declined to provide, later became successful to the point that he showcased his photo projects at an internationally renowned museum in the Netherlands.

Her bond with the Swedish photo artist continued as he flew to the Netherlands last year after hearing that she was in the country on a business trip.

The Museum of Photography opened in 2003, making it the first of its kind in Korea. There are now two photography museums in Korea.

Song said, to some extent her decision to open the photography museum was driven by a mission. Before the museum, she lamented, there were no places that could display and preserve great photos of our time and those taken in the past.

“As director of the museum, my priority is finding undiscovered photographers with great potential. Our museum gives them a chance to showcase their projects so that they can meet the public. We did several exhibitions for emerging photography talent in the past and some of them are very successful now. I feel rewarded whenever I notice such cases.”

Song has taken photos since she went to university. Her major was educational psychology, but she spent more time taking photos.

Since her first exhibition in 1968 at a museum in Seoul, she had showcased her projects for the public several times and published a couple of books featuring some of the best of her works.

Song is now preparing for another historic project at her museum ― an exhibition of Magnum photos taken by legendary photographers as part of the 130th anniversary of the establishment of Korea-France diplomatic relations.

Magnum is an international photographic cooperative founded in 1947 by six renowned photographers, including Robert Capa. The Magnum photographers had their first exhibition in 1956. Since then, all of the pieces were lost. In 2006, those works were discovered and recovered for touring exhibitions.

Song said she was lucky to see those great photos in person at an exhibition in Germany last year. “I was struck by the images in front of me at the museum. I had never seen such a great exhibition before,” she said.

Song contacted Magnum photographers in Germany and expressed her willingness to host an exhibition in Seoul. About a month later, she got a phone call from the headquarters in Paris. Since then, the two sides have worked closely together to make it work.

The Magnum exhibition will open on April 4 at the photography museum. More than 80 photos taken by eight Magnum photographers will be on display.