Donghwan Kam

Department: Social Design

After-photography

Being a photographer, Donghwan Kam uses his camera as a tool to frame reality and to understand the world around him. With the flight of virtual reality, he decided to investigate the relationship between the real and the virtual world – and his wish to frame the latter too. He developed a camera that looks like a standard point-and-shoot model, but is engineered to capture the virtual through the use of sensors attached to the front. With this camera he explored 3D-renderings of recent World Press Photos from a journalist’s perspective. While the photo session itself looks like a wondrous dance in outer space, the pictures resulting from it show how reality becomes ‘objectified’ in this parallel world. ‘After-photography’ aims to provoke critical thinking about the carelessness and passivity inherent in the translation from real to virtual. The project examines new ways of interpreting our contemporary spaces and tries to re-frame any kind of reality through photography.