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A Life of Absence

A Life of Absence interrogates the arc of a life through its remaining traces. The series moves from a fractured beginning and a childhood dream to a preserved silhouette and a distorted memory, culminating in a timeless question of existence.

Awards

Photographer of the Year Contest

2025

Nominee

Conceptual

Non Professional

Nominee

Storytelling

Non Professional

A Life of Absence

A Life of Absence interrogates the arc of a life through its remaining traces. The series moves from a fractured beginning and a childhood dream to a preserved silhouette and a distorted memory, culminating in a timeless question of existence.

About Artist

Leebaeck Choi

I have been photographing for more than thirty years. For me, photography is a way of tracing the unstable threshold between what is seen and what is felt. My work often begins not from certainty, but from hesitation—moments in which a place begins to lose its solidity, a figure becomes a trace, or an object shifts into something symbolic and unresolved. In black and white, I am drawn to boundary, interval, and detail; in color, I seek blur, omission, and the sensory drift that emerges before language can stabilize meaning. Rather than producing descriptive images, I am interested in images that remain slightly open—images that do not insist, but continue to resonate through distance, ambiguity, and incomplete recognition. Beginning last year, when I started submitting my work to photography awards, I also began building photographic series in earnest. Since then, I have become increasingly drawn to the force and resonance that a series can hold. What once felt awkward—the connection between one image and the next—has gradually begun to feel like learning a language, as if each image were slowly teaching me how to read the one that follows.

Leebaeck Choi

Photographic Areas of Focus

Abstract, Aerial, Domestic Animals, Landscapes, Minimalism, Minimalism, Nature, People, People, Still Life, Street, Travel

Location

South Korea

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