PICTURING KOREA
Martin Bennie
As a Scottish landscape photographer and builder of oil rigs, I have been fortunate enough to travel the world while documenting the places I have seen or lived in over the past 25 years. In 2007, two years after the purchase of my first digital camera and the real beginning of my landscape photography journey, I found work building drill ships on a small island in South Korea. With no prior knowledge of what it looked like, off I went.
I soon discovered the beauty of ‘the land of the morning calm’, as it is called. It feels both ancient and modern at the same time, with futuristic looking cities, and historic villages existing side by side one another. Some landscapes contain temples dating back over 5,000 years, for example. The energy in these places is like nothing I had ever experienced before, and I became addicted to exploring the area, and demonstrating its contrast in my shots. I found that photography was very helpful for relieving stress built up at work, and as I continued to practise landscape photography the better my images became.
Sometimes you find a place that feels so much like home that you never feel at home anywhere else—that’s the beauty and the pain of travel. After almost ten years, Korea became home to me, and seven years after leaving, I still miss it.
While Korea is not well-documented in terms of landscape photography, it has everything a landscape or urban photographer could ever need, from ancient villages to modern architecture. If you ever get a chance to visit, I strongly recommend taking it.
This article first appeared in PRISMA, Issue 10.