가벼운 기록이 무게를 갖게 되기까지

Translated automatically into English via AI agent.

In Japan, where collecting culture is deeply rooted, the impulse to continuously gather and hold on to things has long served as material for countless stories. Takeshi Okazaki’s The Agony of a Book Collection explores the various methods the author has devised to cope with an ever-growing number of books, along with the troubles that inevitably follow. There are stories of study floors collapsing and buildings beginning to tilt under the sheer weight of private libraries, as well as collectors who call in secondhand booksellers to clear out their shelves, only to pull a few volumes back at the last minute because they cannot quite bear to let them go. In these scenes—of people returning to bookstores despite knowing full well that they already own more books than they can manage—the attachment that drives collecting and the difficulties it creates appear side by side.

A similar impulse is taken to a more extreme conclusion in “The Secondhand Book Hell Mansion,” a story included in Daijiro Morohoshi’s Night Fish. Somewhere inside a mansion made entirely of secondhand books lie rare, out-of-print volumes coveted by collectors. When someone recklessly tries to pull out a single desired book, the entire structure collapses, leaving them to become a ghost among the ruins. Reading stories like these can make the bookshelves in my own home seem fairly harmless. Yet whenever I find myself rummaging through a corner of the room in search of one particular book, I cannot help but feel grateful, at least, that I live in a concrete building.

The effort involved in storing what we record and collect extends far beyond the bookshelf. Recently, as I began working more with video, I bought two external hard drives in quick succession. I felt a little more at ease only after transferring my data onto something tangible, something I could physically hold, but the possibility of losing the drives or having them suddenly fail still makes it difficult to feel completely secure. If you think about it, photographs and videos are records made to hold on to a single moment in the flow of time. Yet perhaps because they have become so easy to capture and store, at some point I began to feel satisfied simply by having recorded them, without ever really looking back. Once an image is taken, it quickly joins the endless stream of data and begins to drift away again, and it is difficult to form much attachment to records that disappear so easily into that flow.

Jongno host is a photobook assembled from approximately 3,000 digital images taken on an iPhone in and around Jongno, Seoul, between 2017 and 2025. By deciding what to keep, which images to place alongside one another, and arranging them into thirty chapters, the book gives a sense of order to what had once been scattered records. After the laborious process of managing and selecting from this accumulated archive, data that had been piling up almost weightlessly was transformed into its physical opposite: a thick, substantial, 704-page hardcover book. The photographs placed side by side across its spreads are no longer fragments of an endless stream of images on a screen, but records that have been brought to a temporary halt, allowing each scene to be looked at on its own.

If Sam Youkilis’s iPhone photobook Somewhere drifts through scenes from around the world, evoking an unspecified “somewhere,” Jongno host invites the reader into a particular place—Jongno—and guides them through it. As the pages turn, the photographer becomes a host, offering up the Jongno he has seen and recorded over the past nine years, while the reader becomes his guest, following his gaze through its alleys, streets, and crowds.
Because a phone camera can be pulled out at any moment and, at times, used without drawing much attention from the people being photographed, the book is filled less with grand vistas than with vivid scenes encountered while moving through Jongno: people and objects, alleys and expressions. Following the host’s guidance through the book’s thirty chapters, the Jongno recorded by the photographer begins to overlap with my own memories of the neighborhood. Before long, I find myself encountering those slightly strange and amusing sides of Jongno that somehow feel familiar to all of us.

Moments that once had no physical weight are given substance by becoming a book. As they can now be revisited again and again simply by turning the pages, the emptiness I sometimes feel when records remain only as data is replaced by the sense that different memories can be shared through a single object. Perhaps it is this small, sweet satisfaction that keeps me buying books, even if it means accepting the trouble of a bookshelf that sags a little under their weight. If a friend were coming to visit Jongno, this is the book I would want to give them.