Winter is the season that tells the truth. It strips the landscape back to its essential grammar — bare branch, pale sky — and in doing so reveals a beauty that the other seasons, with their insistence on abundance and colour, tend to obscure. A figure on a Seoul street corner in the grey interval before snow, carries a gravity that the same figure in summer would not — as though the cold has distilled something, concentrated the self down to its irreducible core. These portraits were made in that distillation. In the belief that beauty, at its most serious, has always had something to do with subtraction — with the courage to let the unnecessary fall away.
