To Bury The Dog Properly, Minji Yi

“The sum of what I have seen via screen/bare eyes/a telescope does not come together as a single scene.” - Minji Yi

The fifteenth photobook of Aprilsnow Press is photographer Minji Yi’s TO BURY THE DOG PROPERLY. The book is a compilation of two photo series, the ‘light-volume’(2015~2019) and ‘sight lag’(2017~2019).

The series ‘light volume’ is composed of photos Minji Yi had seen and unseen before and after the death of her grandmother. Seeing her grandmother nearing her death, the photographer contemplates her grandmother’s life as a female who was a Korean War refugee, laborer and deacon and moved from one place to another in Korea. What she captured was a nomadic life of a Korean woman who had to live a life of floating but disconnected identities. Photography is believed to be a medium which records an object or scene the most truthful way, but there is always the grey zone which photography misses. Minji Yi explores through ‘light volume’ series what can be seen and unseen through photography, which is at the same time an idiosyncratic approach of memorizing her grandmother’s past life. 

The series ‘sight lag’ which follows the former ‘light volume’ is a bold and experimental photographic approach. Minji Yi flew over to Iceland, where she thought would be the most distanced spot from her grandmother’s place. The landscape she had seen on Iceland with its white night and the one she saw on Google Earth never match together. Would there ever be a possibility of capturing a whole scene through photography? ‘Sight lag’ is a conceptual interpretation of the function and role of photography.

The book starts with ‘sight lag’ first, which is followed by ‘light volume’ series. Each of the series is printed on the same paper but with different weight. Both series are loosely separated by the the paper weight and editing style. Especially, a peculiar editing and design is applied to ‘light volume’ series; as a structural interpretation of ‘sight lag’, photographs are laid out not on each spread. Instead, they are laid out on the front and back of six octavo-sheets. Once they are folded and collated, one has 96 pages of disconnected and segmented photographs. Photographs become fragments and they appear and disappear throughout the pages.

Published by Aprilsnow Press
First Edition of 300
Softcover
144 pages
220 x 300 mm
ISBN 9791189478049