∴Serial Music: Vol. 05 is Out!∴

Plus a dubious reward for those curious enough to scroll to the bottom

I’ve long believed that it’s a photo-faux pas to photograph the back of someone’s head. I realized early on that the back-of-the-head shot was made from a kind of defensive posture. My thinking more or less amounted to I don’t want to be seen doing this, least of all by the person I’m photographing. Deeper down, if I’m honest with myself, I’d rephrase it like this: I want to photograph this person without the time and investment of knowing them.

So it may surprise you (it did me) to know that the cover below of Serial Music: Vol. 05 (out now!) is the first of 3 covers in the series to feature the back of a head.

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.

If you stick around to the end of this newsletter, I’ll show you the front of the head too. But for now I want to explain what turned my own head on its ear about this matter.

My initial aversion to the back-of-the-head photograph was this: The back of the head is only worth photographing when it’s more interesting than the front. Writing this down now, I still roughly believe it.

The trouble with my thinking here is the effect that it had on my curiosity. I was carrying with me the presumption that I’d find nothing interesting looking in certain places, the back of the head being one of them, which in turn gave me reason not to look. It was a self-fulfilling way of thinking, and since realizing this habit within me, it’s one I’ve been trying to break.

Serial Music is the result of learning to be curious again, and to look for images in places I’d previously either written off or ignored. Another way to put it is this: curiosity inspires appreciation. By fostering my curiosity, I came to a greater appreciation of what I see. It doesn’t seem to work as well the other way round. This has lead me to looking for photos for this project in places that a few years ago I’d have never considered. It’s made me a more open-minded photographer.

It’s also made more more open-minded about how I share my photography, like with these custom vinyl slipmats

With all that in mind, let me tell you about the pair that opens up SM05. The image coming up of the man in blue with the ‘Sound Mind Sound Body’ jacket and the painted eye-brows (hard to see on a phone? If only you could see it in person), that was one of the first images made for this project. I drove real early to the beach one day, which if you know anything about Seoul raises more questions than it answers, and after a frigid dip I walked behind the surrounding dunes. The roads there had that feeling of being built for infrastructure that did not yet exist.

I came across a woman feeding meat to a pack of puppies crowding behind a fence. They looked a little worse for wear. She told me that they were neglected by their owner, so she and her husband came once a week or so to feed them. She then instructed me to enter the tent.

The man inside welcomed me and told me to sit opposite him, gesturing to what must have been his wife’s chair. She wasn’t using it, what with the pups. He was curious about me and South Africa and he liked soccer. He offered me food and we ate and spoke of the dogs a bit. I guess it wasn’t only the dogs that had been hoping to get fed. If I’m honest, I don’t recall many of the details of our conversation - just that both of these people displayed a gentleness that must surely come from some kind of peace deep inside.

The photo on the right, the one that makes up the pair, is something a little closer to a self-portrait. It’s maybe not the most flattering, but it resonates and I like it. It happens to resemble the line-work behind the blue man, and I like that too.

Now I promised you a look at the face from the cover that I chose not to show. You asked for it:

I got maybe a half-dozen photos of this scene, in a small town in an idyllic valley to the north east. Some things permeate everywhere. Try as I might, every photo I took bowed to the weight of the icon, rendering the photo itself more or less meaningless. I wasn’t satisfied with what I was getting, until, as the man walked away, before the distance grew, I saw something that connects for me and hopefully for all of us.

I could write here about being in our own heads, about having our heads much too much in underwhelming places, about the masks we wear, or about the delicate point of contact between what we see and how we want to be seen. But I’ll leave it at this:

Treasure your curiosity, for the appreciation it inspires.

Serial Music: Vol. 05 is out now. You can get it here, you know, if you’re curious.

Cheers,
Chris ✌️