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| © JeongMee Yoon |
| "Ethan and His Blue Things." Click photo for more images. |
Geonhi Art Foundation, Bohnchang Koo; 80 pages; 46 color photographs; $30
JeongMee Yoon's Pink & Blue Project originally stemmed from her 8-year-old daughter's obsession with pink -- an obsession so complete she would "wear only pink clothes and play with only pink toys." Yoon soon discovered that this childhood color worship stretches beyond the borders of her native South Korea. In the division of boys into a realm of blue and girls into a forest of pink, Yoon recognized the related themes of color, gender, and consumerism.
Yoon's images record young boys and girls in their rooms, with their color-coded clothes and toys and books arranged in careful displays around them. "This method shows my organization of subjects similar to the way in which museums categorize their inventories and display their collections," she writes. Shooting with a Hasselblad, Yoon composed and exposed each photograph uniformly, always using an aperture setting of f/22 to ensure every detail was sharply rendered.
The implications of her dense images seem to fall heavily on the tiny shoulders of the children captured within each frame. They become both subject and object, perpetrator and victim of gender expectations and corporate marketing muscle.
Yoon's project received the 2006 Daum Award, sponsored by the Geonhi Art Foundation of South Korea. Headed by renowned photographer Bohnchang Koo, the foundation presents the award to one photographic or video artist each year to help them complete a large project. In 2006 Yoon also received an honorable mention at the International Photography Awards and received the Aaron Siskind Scholarship the year before. Contact Photo-Eye (photoeye.com) to order the book.
-Miki Johnson
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