Defying Biotic Protocol
Notes from Agricultural Landscapes in South Korea
I have been photographing rural South Korea since 2019. What began as an attempt to understand the landscapes surrounding my home has gradually developed into a longer investigation into how agriculture, environmental management, and climate adaptation reshape ecological systems.
Much of my time is spent moving through agricultural regions: reclaimed coastlines, reservoirs, greenhouses, drainage channels, rice fields, orchards, and areas where cultivation gives way to abandonment. I often return to the same places repeatedly, sometimes over several years, observing subtle changes that would be difficult to notice in a single visit. A newly constructed embankment, a field left uncultivated, a stream redirected, a hillside cleared, a greenhouse abandoned after a season of use. These small transformations accumulate and gradually reveal larger patterns.
The title, Defying Biotic Protocol, emerged from thinking about the increasing effort devoted to regulating biological processes. Contemporary agriculture depends upon systems designed to control growth, maximise productivity, and minimise uncertainty. Irrigation networks, pesticides, engineered waterways, climate-controlled structures, and increasingly sophisticated forms of environmental monitoring all seek to manage the behaviour of living systems. Yet these landscapes continually exceed the frameworks imposed upon them. Weather events, invasive species, soil exhaustion, declining biodiversity, and other ecological responses reveal the limits of control.
As I photograph, I find myself paying attention to traces rather than events. Ecological change rarely appears as spectacle. Instead, it becomes visible through subtle signs embedded in the landscape itself: eroded shorelines, monocultural fields, artificial waterways, plastic coverings, exhausted soils, or fragments of habitat isolated between roads and agricultural infrastructure. The landscapes often appear ordinary. Their complexity emerges slowly.
My approach remains rooted in documentary photography, although the work increasingly moves beyond straightforward description. I am interested in how photographs can function simultaneously as records and as questions. The images reference traditions of landscape photography, yet they also challenge the idea of landscape as a stable or purely aesthetic subject. Rather than presenting nature as separate from human activity, the photographs describe environments that are already shaped by economic, technological, and political decisions.
Working in South Korea while carrying with me ideas formed through Scandinavian landscape traditions creates a productive distance. Certain assumptions about nature, conservation, and environmental stewardship become visible only when viewed across cultural contexts. At the same time, many of the transformations I encounter here are not uniquely Korean. They are connected to global systems of food production, resource extraction, climate adaptation, and ecological governance.
Alongside photography, I record video and gather material through field observations, mapping, environmental reports, archival research, and conversations with residents and agricultural workers. These different forms of inquiry inform one another. Often the research does not explain what I see; instead, it complicates it.
Increasingly, I think of the landscape as a form of evidence. Not evidence of a single event, but of ongoing negotiations between ecological systems and human ambitions. The photographs document places where those negotiations have left visible marks.
I do not approach these landscapes searching for pristine nature, nor do I intend the work as a catalogue of environmental damage. Instead, I am interested in the unstable territory between cultivation and ecology, productivity and vulnerability, control and uncertainty. The landscapes documented here are neither natural nor artificial. They are environments continuously produced through interactions between biological processes, technological systems, political decisions, and climatic conditions.
This journal is an attempt to follow those interactions as they unfold.
