Interview
I was browsing Lens Scratch and came across a photographer named Nanda. Her series of work featured on Lens Scratch is called Modern Girl. The Modern Girl refers to women in Korea who embraced western urban culture. In her work she uses repetition to represent an anonymous and unified self in modern society. She uses a backdrop of a movie set featuring scenery of Seoul from the late 19th century. Nanda references the past and the modern world to show an overlapping of time. All of the "modern girls" are wearing sunglasses to represent erasing a person's identity with a black bar over the eyes. Nanda is concerned with propaganda, surveillance, possessive desires, reality and spectacle. Her reason for choosing a woman to represent modernity and the people living in it was to compare a male/female dynamic between the empire and the colony where the empire is compared to the male and the colony/imitating person to the female.
She makes these images by compositing multiple images to create a filled composition. Her use of repeating a single subject emphasizes her concept of an anonymous and unified self. I really enjoy her concept and how she chooses to convey it. I think because the same woman is repeated, it comes across as a collective mindset. Personally, I have always wanted to try compositing images like Nanda does. Though I must say her images are composited in a very complex way. I love the image with an obvious nod to Rene Magritte with the poster of the man with the hat and pipe and of course the women in the sky with umbrellas. Nanda references a lot in her work. She takes recognizable modern symbols like coffee cups, guns, and posters and mixes the old with the new to comment on modernization of Korean culture and the influence of visual media on people and society in general.
-Bri
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