∴Serial Music: Vol. 04 is Out!∴
Over the course of 2024 I put together 12 photo booklets featuring pairs of images made here in Korea. I’m releasing one a month from the start of 2025. This project is called Serial Music.
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Although clipped by Korea’s latest snowstorm in almost 100 years, April’s warmth has finally settled into the soil. The days are longer for the sun, and the feeling of having more day than things to do - a feeling always dashed by winter - has returned. From here where I sit in the window-light of a late-morning Seoul, I’m happy to say that Serial Music: Vol. 04 is out.
Serial Music has taken up a big portion of headspace over the last two years. I’ve learned that a project can claim your attention even when you’re not directly working on it. I think I could work on my compartmentalisation skills, but that’s part of why I do these projects - to show me all the places I have some learning to do.
But now with SM04 done, and 05 through 07 in their final stages, I feel my mind opening up again to the possibilities of where my attention will go next.
For now it’s split - which is not, alas, the same as compartmentalised - between the work I was doing last year shooting in Seoul’s residential areas, and the possible new projects I’d like to work on in the coming years.
I’ve also been able to spend a bit more time making videos for YouTube, and sharing work on Instagram. There’s been a newsletter bouncing around on Substack recently lamenting social media’s denting of our beloved medium, but honestly, I don’t buy it. At least not all of it. I think there’s something to be said for sharing on these platforms thoughtfully, recognizing their usefulness and shrugging off the parts that annoy us.1
In other news we’ve had a little street cat visiting our studio this past month. She’s leery of touch but visits us daily, eats everything we give her and has become more chatty in the last week or so. We’ve got plans to get her to a vet soon so I’ll keep you posted on that.
Oh, and her working title is Tubby.
Let me end off with one of my favorite pairs from Vol. 04. An initial impetus for this project was to learn how to shake my habits of attention by opening my mind to what I considered worthy of photographing. Over time I started noticing bits and pieces of this country I’d largely overlooked before. The praying mantis was one of them. I remember the first mantis I saw, as a kid skating my backyard miniramp one day. There it was with its drunken lurches and its mannequin soul. I dreamed that night it was on my bed in the sheets and I couldn’t get away.
I went to church a lot as a kid too, but I’ve barely stepped inside one here in Korea. The last one I visited was for a wedding. My friend, sat next to me in the pews, was on his phone when I noticed the stained glass windows overhead were completely submerged in the crystal reflection. It was like for a moment there was a bit of holiness in this technology we love for making dreams real and hate for the same reason. It was only after getting the scan back I saw how the hands resembled claws.
For me these images speak to a very hard to articulate quality of my remembered childhood, equal parts openness and contraction. But that’s just this pair. Maybe the Serial Music pairs will bring out something from back then for you, too.
Serial Music: Vol. 04 is out now. It’s an edition of 30, so I hope you get to see it.
Cheers,
Chris.
I do agree there’s a perniciousness to the attention economy that must not be understated. A big reason so many of us have come to Substack is that it gives us this sense of being in control of our attention again. I’m not arguing that we ignore that, but that there’s a baby still splashing away in that bathwater.
Chris, your writing is very good. This was a great read and super enjoying your documentation of this process with Serial Music and the multi-medium approach you’re taking with it. Just so friggin’ cool. Thanks for sharing, bud.