This is an image series which certainly requires some explanation on my part. As with all these written pieces, I stress that I’m not offering an interpretation of the images themselves; rather explaining my motivation for making and showing them.

This week’s series is the first of two parts and represents part of a site which I have been documenting for the last year.

I stumbled across the site in North Seoul about a year ago, quite by accident. I had been looking at the nearby golfing range, and discovered that the adjacent residential area was a tad too quiet.

When I began wandering about to investigate, I realized that the area, a whole development of apartment buildings, had been completely deserted.

I guessed at this point that this was one of those areas of smaller homes and apartments that I’d previously heard about, which had been marked for redevelopment.

What interested me at the time, and still does, are the signs of the peoples’ lives that had been left behind. An exodus seemed to have happened dramatically, and in a very hurried way. Whole homes of furniture had been strewn on the streets, smashed to pieces, after assumably, having been hurled from upstairs windows.

In some cases, the furniture and possessions had been completely deserted, as if the families, who had lived there, had vanished in a sudden, violent moment. In fact, there was an overall sense of a violent act having taken place.

So I enquired about the social and economic background to the event and ones like it.

I found that smaller apartments in Seoul are less valuable than their 15-20 floor relatives. Whole communities are formed around the latter, with schools, libraries and hospitals springing up in their locality. The latter are also usually of a larger type internally, with more living space.

There’s also a strange phenomenon that one can’t help but notice after spending some time in Korea. I don’t wish to make any unfair generalisations, however it seems that Koreans often don’t repair things. I mean anything from a tape player to an apartment. Things are used and replaced. I daily see things thrown out on the street, which I know would have been repaired in other places.

This day, I saw a whole apartment complex, and its contents, literally hurled out on the street.

I’m convinced, and this is a subjective observation, that the thirst for development, of the former military president of South Korea, Park Chung Hee, has stayed with Koreans, and possibly picked up momentum. The changes from an agrarian based economy to an industrialised one, in less than one person’s lifetime have had a twofold effect on Korean people and their consciousness.

Think about it for a moment, if you will. The home is traditionally a base point, a permanent ground of solace, of recovery; peace. When a home itself is subjected to the market economy, the profit system; when it becomes a moving, morphing entity: what changes does that ‘inflict’ on its inhabitants? I don’t personally know the answer to this question, but I have my own theories.

It was personally a very sad experience for me to witness this area. I know that in some cases, tenants are forcibly removed, so their rental homes can be demolished. I don’t know if that took place here. But the sight of a couple’s wedding photograph, thrown in the rubble was a harrowing image for me.

It seems prudent, (at the risk of sounding prescriptive) that the ordinary people of all market economies and Korea’s stop for a moment, and take stock of what has really been gained and lost by throwing everything at a system that absorbs everything, and only values profit.