On January 10, 2020 I took this smartphone photo of an apartment block next to the one I was
living
in at that time in Munich. This image taken at night hints at the things to come, when people
were
isolated at home for months to come, due to Covid 19 related lockdowns and restrictions. Im
March, I
managed to get the last airplane to Seoul, where I also lived with my Korean wife. Unlike
Germany,
South Korea did never need lockdowns, but I could not leave the country for 3 years. So I
started my
photo project PAUSE to portray my local grungy neighborhood at the end of December 2020, Germany
just had gone in another lockdown while South Korea had just introduced tighter rules because of
the
pandemic. Both countries had around 1000 Covid 19 cases a day then. In Germany that number meant
deaths, while in Korea it was the number of new infections in the whole country.
Human life in those dark times was happening only privately behind doors and windows. Shops,
bars,
restaurants were either completely shut down or closed early. Usually busy nightlife and
entertainment areas were deserted, and of course it helped that it was icy cold outside too.
Since that time in late December, I often walked around the Yangcheongu district after midnight
to
photograph the eerily silent city , which looked like an abandoned theater set. I was interested
in
the empty spaces of the (disappearing) neighborhoods full of patina, history and human traces.
The longer I roamed the same streets night after night, the more I felt like Bill Murray in the
movie “Groundhog Day”. It seemed that I got to know every street, every corner and every stone
in my
neighborhood. Ironically, while I was photographing the abandoned streets and dystopian urban
spaces
of Seoul, I was actually much safer here than if I had been staying in my native Germany. PAUSE
was
finished in March of 2022, when restrictions in both countries were lifted.
Matthias Ley, Germany