Documentary Projects Shortlist

Following the Seoul Fortress Plan of the late 1960s, extensive barriers were constructed in South Korea to halt a North Korean armoured advance, expanding through the late Cold War. Landmines were widely deployed to block infiltration, forming what was believed to be an impassable ‘no man’s land’. While researching various collapses and fatal explosions, the photographer recognised a contradiction; he explains that ‘past security logic endangers the present’. Leaving military school, he began constructing a photographic cartography of these Cold War peripheries, and traced the river systems of the Han, Imjin, and Hantan Rivers, areas where lost landmines remain buried, moving upstream through the Western and Central Fronts to photograph the anti-tank obstacles and minefields that remain.