Kim Jung Man
Photographer
Photographer Kim Jung-Man (1954–2022) expanded the horizons of Korean contemporary photography with a sensibility shaped by distant journeys and an experimental gaze. In 1977 he won the Young Photographer Award at the Arles International Photography Festival, later becoming the youngest to be named among “80 Photographers of Today.” Over subsequent decades, he produced nearly 800,000 images across film posters, fashion, and advertising.
Rejecting conventional angles, he sought the most natural moments, approaching the essence of his subjects and forging an aesthetic charged with vitality and tension. By the 2000s he was recognized as “Fashion Photographer of the Year” and one of “Korea.com’s 33 Cultural Figures.” Yet beyond commercial acclaim, he turned to cultural heritage and nature, achieving a rare equilibrium between popular success and artistic experiment, establishing his reputation as one of Korea’s most distinctive photographic voices.
Kim Jung Man:
Breathing new life into photography through themes of life, death, and love.
The work of photographer Kim Jung-Man (1954–2022) unfolds around the universal themes of life, death, and love. Across flowers and animals, portraits and landscapes, he captured both beauty and imperfection, rendering the dual truths of human existence.
His images defined cultural moments through iconic film posters such as The Host, Tazza, and A Bittersweet Life, and countless portraits of stars, while the Africa series and his studies of nature bridged Korean sensibility with a global vision.
This trajectory forged a worldview that balances pop immediacy with classical depth. After 2006, he stepped away from commercial practice to devote himself to explorations of life and nature across Africa and the polar regions. These later works, beyond mere documentation, endowed the photographic image with a renewed vitality, standing as an enduring artistic declaration.
Kim Jung Man:
From life, death, and love to a renewed vitality of images in the digital age.
Kim Jung-Man’s practice consistently gravitated toward the elemental themes of life, death, and love. Through flowers and nature, figures and landscapes, he captured both beauty and fragility, extending photography from documentation into a language of thought.
After withdrawing from commercial work, his journeys across Africa and the polar regions deepened this vision, revealing the sublime and the transient in nature with profound affection. As his artistic world intersected with digitized technology, the still image acquired new vitality—imbued with light, sound, and motion—and opened as a window of solace and reflection for the contemporary city. It is at precisely this juncture that the project with NEWance finds its resonance.
