Article originally published by the International Examiner on March 13th, 2025. Written by Susan Kunimatsu.
Silent Songs: The Photography of Johsel Namkung at the Cascadia Art Museum is both a retrospective and a biography. Namkung, who died in 2013 at the age of 94, was one of the most distinguished landscape photographers in the Pacific Northwest. This show surveys his striking landscapes along with lesser-known works by Namkung and his contemporaries that offer more personal insight into his life and career.
Johsel Namkung was born in 1919 in Korea. Influenced by his eldest brother, a noted composer and poet, he decided to become a musician. He entered the Tokyo Conservatory of Music, studying voice and music theory under European teachers, and winning the All-Japan Music Contest in 1940. There, he met Mineko Suematsu. As World War II intensified, the Namkung family fled to Shanghai. Johsel and Mineko joined them there and married in 1941.
During the war, they moved from China to Japan to Korea, but as a Korean-Japanese couple, they faced prejudice in all those places. In 1947, they came to Seattle, where Johsel landed a scholarship and a teaching assistantship in the University of Washington School of Music. He completed his studies in 1951, but supporting a family which now included two daughters proved incompatible with a classical music career. He took a job as a language specialist with Northwest Orient Airlines. Mineko opened an art gallery and the Namkungs made friends with other artists. Johsel took up photography as a means of creative expression, then more seriously as a profession.
In Seattle, he apprenticed with Chao-Chen Yang, a teacher and commercial photographer known for his innovations in color photographic processes. He traveled to California to take a workshop with Ansel Adams, renowned for his dramatic black and white landscapes. He worked in a commercial photo-processing laboratory, honing his skills producing large scale prints. Returning to the University of Washington, he spent 25 years as a medical photographer. All of these experiences influenced his own photographs.
Namkung’s career began decades before the invention of digital photography. Traditional or analog photography uses clear film or glass coated with light-sensitive chemicals. When exposed to light, the chemical coating forms an image that can be reproduced at larger sizes by projecting light through the film or glass onto paper that is also coated with light-sensitive chemicals. Because the chemicals are applied as liquids and become part of the film or paper, the image resolution is extremely high, down to the molecular level. Unlike digital photographs, these images do not pixelate. However, the process of setting or “developing” images on film and printing them on paper is labor intensive. It must take place in a light-free environment, literally a “darkroom” and requires expertise and expensive, sometimes toxic chemicals. Today, analog photography is an artform with few practitioners.
Northwest landscapes were Namkung’s primary subject. He traveled the Pacific Northwest scouting locations, carefully framing shots and timing exposures to make the best use of natural light. His favorite camera used 4 x 5-inch sheets of film when the most common size was 35 mm (less than 1-1/2 inches). These large negatives could produce even larger images of incredible sharpness. For many years, Nankung made his own prints, striving for the minimum manipulation of images in the darkroom.
In a 2012 artist statement, he said: “My negatives are my definitive statement and they need not be cropped or altered. At least that is what I aspire to.”
This exhibition spans three galleries. The large center room contains a survey of Namkung’s landscapes from the 1960s to the 1990s, in color or black and white. Some are views of mountainsides, forests and beaches. Others are closeups of rocks, plants, and rills. Many of the latter are abstract compositions of color and texture; the true scale of the object is hard to discern. All reflect Namkung’s rigorous technique, but also his love of music. Describing what he searched for in a landscape, he said,
“[T]here always has to be a unifying kinetic force. Which means the rhythm, and in musical terms the melodic lines…I always see melodic lines, and counterbalancing forces, and weight, and harmony. And that becomes the skeletal form of my photographs.” A striking example is “Osack, Seoraksan National Park, Korea” (1987). Printed on a traditional six-panel folding screen, its forested ridgelines recede one behind the other like the melodies of a fugue.
Music is literally on view in the west gallery, which Cascadia Art Museum curator David Martin refers to as the “music room”. It includes portraits of famous musicians taken by Namkung: Isaac Stern, Jessye Norman, Ithzak Perlman, Yoyo Ma and others. Their warm personal inscriptions are evidence of Namkung’s personal connections to the classical music community.
Johsel and Mineko Namkung were friends with a who’s who of prominent Seattle artists: Kenneth Callahan, Paul Horiuchi, John Matsudaira, Kenjiro Nomura, Mark Tobey and George Tsutakawa. Several of the artists would host dinners for the group. After dinner they would sketch or practice sumi-e painting together. Occasionally Namkung sang classical songs, accompanied by Tobey on the piano. The east gallery features photos of the friends together on location and at social gatherings, alongside a few of their sketches. Several finished works illustrate their artistic connections. Matsudaira and Tsutakawa painted the same locations that Namkung photographed. Many of the works in the east and west galleries have never been exhibited before. Martin worked with Namkung’s second wife Monica to assemble works and ephemera from the Namkung family’s personal collection and from Johsel’s artist colleagues. It’s a peek into the family album of a famous artist.
You can find the original article by clicking on this link.