maus contemporary - Yeon Joong Yue

Yeon J. Yue “Grey American Landscape”

My recent series, “Grey American Landscape,” came out of a three-month, cross-country road trip on which I photographed American military families, military towns, and tourist areas from Los Angeles to New York in the summer of 2009. More about families than politics, the resulting images look at the American landscape through the lens of its military culture and its co-existing security, insecurity, reality and fictions.

I was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, an area still dominated by ideological conflict. At the age of 6 my family moved to Osan Air Force base following my father to fulfill his national duty, and lived there for 3years. Later, at the age of 22, I joined the military service (as most of South Koreans do) and was assigned to Osan Air Base myself. I had the opportunity to see my childhood “America” again through adult eyes. While I was there, the 9/11 attacks happened in New York, and everything felt new and strange. So when I moved to New York for graduate school, I set out on a road trip to see the real America. At first it was a general road trip, but it gained its focus when I began noticing grey patches on Google Maps: every military base in the country is represented in that vast online mapping system as a grey area.

I became curious to see what was there. I contacted and met some military families through my dear friend Tony, an American soldier who I met at Osan. Others I met through Facebook groups or the public affairs offices of military bases. Families living on-base opened their homes to me for several days at a time. I got to know them and their children. In exchange for the opportunity to photograph their lives, I offered to make family portraits. The photos carry the sense of intimacy and connection that comes of fitting yourself for a time into a life that doesn’t belong to you—the sound of the air conditioning unit, the smell of someone else’s blankets and pillows.

The photos taken on military bases are mostly of families and their homes and lives, people caring for each other in moments of both intimacy and absurdity. But I also photographed landscapes and tourist sites during that summer road trip, many of which take on the appearance of combat zones: a burning field in Junction City, Kansas, or visitors at Pike’s Peak, Colorado, walking through a deep fog that looks like smoke or ash. Together, the images in “Grey American Landscape” speak to the ways in which even when we are dealing with reality, we are still writing a fiction.

	Grey American Landscape black & white photographs				Grey American Landscape color photographs


	access the entire b&w series by clicking on above image				access the entire color series by clicking on above image