Visual Journey through South Korea

I was recently given the wonderful opportunity to join Antje from @nextstopkorea and Dony from @BusanMate on an unforgettable journey through South Korea, capturing their adventures through my lens. What followed was a week of discovery, tradition and natural wonder that exceeded all my expectations.

Jeonju (전주): Where Tradition Comes Alive

Our adventure began in Jeonju, a city where history whispers from every corner. We dove straight into the culinary heart of Korea, savoring authentic Jeonju Bibimbap (전주 비빔밥) at its birthplace. This iconic dish, a harmonious bowl of rice, vegetables and gochujang (고추장, red chili paste), has evolved through Korean dynasties, with Jeonju often quoted as its home.

Wandering through Jeonju Hanok Village (전주 한옥마을) felt like stepping back in time. Traditional wooden houses with their elegantly curved roofs lined the streets and as evening fell, we experienced true Korean hospitality by spending the night on warm ondol (온돌, underfloor heating) floors in a traditional hanok (한옥, traditional Korean house).

Mokpo (목포) to Jeju (제주): Ferry Adventure

Our journey continued south to Mokpo, where we boarded a ferry bound for Jeju Island. Despite the overcast skies and steady rain, our spirits remained high. Upon arrival, we warmed ourselves with Jeju's signature Abalone Hot Stone Pot Rice (전복돌솥밥, jeonbok dolsot-bap), a bubbling comfort that perfectly captured the island's maritime character.

Meeting the Haenyeo (해녀): Women of the Sea

The following day was one of my personal highlights. At Haenyeo's Kitchen in Bukchon (북촌), we got to eat freshly made meals with locally harvested ingredients traditionally collected by Haenyeo - Jeju's legendary sea women. These incredible women have been free diving these waters for generations, some still diving well into their 90s. They harvest marine life like abalone, sea urchin and seaweed from the ocean floor without any breathing equipment.

Getting to learn about their culture and way of life through both their words and their food was humbling and left me with a deep sense of respect for their heritage.

Jeju's Natural Wonders

One of our most exciting stops was Jeongbang Waterfall (정방폭포), where three waterfalls drop straight into the ocean. Standing on the volcanic rocks with the group posing for photos, we could feel the raw power of the water and sea spray around us.

Bijarim Forest (비자림) was like stepping into another world. Walking among nutmeg trees (비자나무, bijanamu) that are hundreds, some even over a thousand years old, felt surreal. Sunlight came through the dense canopy, creating rays of light that danced through the afternoon mist. The forest floor was soft with moss and the air smelled of earth and ancient wood. This protected forest has stood here for centuries.

At Sangumburi Crater (산굼부리), we stood at the edge of a huge volcanic formation, looking down into the bowl-shaped depression below. Unlike most craters, Sangumburi has no peak - just a perfectly round hollow formed by a volcanic explosion thousands of years ago. The crater floor has a unique mix of rare plants and trees, creating beautiful layers of green that change with the seasons.

We took a quick ferry ride to Udo Island (우도), a small island off Jeju's eastern coast. Standing at the edge near Udobong Peak (우도봉), the dramatic rock formations jutting out of the turquoise water were incredible. The four tiny figures in our photo really show how massive these rock formations are!

Sweet Surprises: Green Tangerine Picking

One of the most delightful experiences was visiting a local tangerine orchard. Despite their vibrant green color, Jeju's green tangerines (풋귤, pootgyul) are incredibly sweet and juicy, a revelation for anyone accustomed to thinking green means unripe. We met a local farmer who generously shared his knowledge about cultivating these unique citrus fruits in Jeju's volcanic soil. The taste of a freshly picked tangerine, still warm from the sun, is something I won't soon forget.

서귀다원 Green Tea Fields

The rolling green tea fields of a local family-owned farm stretched before us like an ocean. Walking between the meticulously maintained rows, populated by hundreds of dragonflies, was like straight out of a fairytale. The green tea (녹차, nokcha) we tried here was one of the best green teas I have ever had!

Jeju Folk Village (제주민속촌): Wishes and Traditions

At Jeju Folk Village, we got to see what life on Jeju looked like in the past. This outdoor museum has authentic thatched-roof houses and shows traditional Jeju culture. We took part in traditional wish-making, something that has connected generations of Jeju residents to their ancestors. The ancient dol hareubang (돌하르방, stone grandfather statues) are scattered throughout, they have been protecting Jeju homes for centuries and you see them everywhere on the island.

Bonte Museum (본태박물관): Art Meets Nature

On our last day we visited Bonte Museum, a nice quiet break from all the outdoor activities. This art museum combines modern architecture with Jeju's natural surroundings and has collections of Buddhist art, Traditional Korean art and contemporary pieces. The wooden sculptures and colorful painted figures were beautiful and showed centuries of artistic tradition.

Reflections

This journey through South Korea was more than just a photography assignment, it was an immersion into a culture that honors its past while embracing the future. From the Haenyeo's century-old diving traditions to the modern wind farms powering Jeju's future, from ancient nutmeg forests to contemporary museums, every moment revealed another layer of Korea's rich tapestry.

Traveling with Antje and Dony and meeting the wonderful people along the way reminded me why I love photography. It's not just about capturing beautiful landscapes or interesting faces, it's about preserving moments and building bridges between cultures.

South Korea, with its warmth, beauty and endless surprises, has captured my heart.

All photographs © Nomi Sophie

Mercy Street, Dreamer’s Alley

elderly man looking out at sea - jeju, south korea

Just a few weeks ago I walked by a pretty dilapidated building in Seoul. A place where someone's dream has quite obviously ended, where the vision that brought something into existence has moved on, failed or simply run its course. But it lingers on, the walls still stand and the rooms still hold space. The architecture of someone's hope remains long after the dreamer has gone.

There is a song by Peter Gabriel I really enjoy that reminds me of this liminal notion. I think at this point I have shared ‘Mercy Street’ with at least two dozens of people and every time someone asks, I tell them the same thing: to dream is to persevere. If you are looking for the connection between my conclusion and his piece of art I recommend to take a quiet listen and let yourself be embraced. The fundamentals of this song explore the idea of survival amidst tremendous despair, inspired by poet Anne Sexton, and how everything we are surrounded by, was, in its humble beginnings, just a wishful thought in someone's head.

The song speaks of how all buildings, all cars, were once just dreams. I think about that part of the song quite often whenever I stroll through randomly chosen side alleys with my camera, examining raw and quiet spaces of everyday life. Some empty parking garage at dusk. The worn steps of an apartment building where thousands of feet have traced the same path. A single window glowing in an otherwise dark building. Shattered glass below a curb.

These aren't remarkable things. But they're evidence of persistence. Someone imagined that parking garage. Drew it. Poured concrete. Built something from nothing because they needed it to exist. That's what dreaming is, not just the pretty, aspirational version we talk about at graduations but also the stubborn insistence on bringing something into the world that wasn't there before.

As a photographer I'm drawn to these monuments of quiet perseverance. A corner store that's been run by the same family for thirty years. The handwritten sign taped to a door. The chair someone left on a curb, still perfectly functional, just no longer needed. Each one represents someone's dream made tangible, even if that dream was as simple as "I need somewhere to sit" or "people need groceries in this neighborhood."

Gabriel's song understands something about survival that took me a long time to learn: that continuing to exist in the face of despair is itself an act of creation. That waking up and putting on my clothes when everything feels impossible is its own form of dreaming, the dream that today might be bearable and that tomorrow might be different.

That's what the song means to me. To dream isn't about the destination. It's about the perseverance of bringing something from the abstract into the real. Of saying "this could exist" and then doing the unglamorous work of making it exist. Of drawing light from the simple ability of imagining something that has not yet come to fruition.

Every photograph I take is my own version of this. A moment that existed only in my mind's eye until I directed my camera at something and pressed the shutter. A way of seeing that I am trying to make real, trying to share and trying to preserve against the inevitable forgetting that comes with time.

Dreaming and persevering are the same thing, just different words for the stubborn human insistence on making something from nothing and refusing to let the imagined remain imaginary.

Buildings don't announce themselves. Cars rust without attendance. But they were all just someone's small or large act of faith that what they imagined could become real. And now here they stand, holding space in the world and show us that perseverance looks like this: solid and unglamorous.

This is why I photograph. Every dream that becomes real is proof that we can survive our despair long enough to make something that outlasts it.

Between Armrest and Atmosphere

I write this as I sit perched between armrests inside a giant tin can - a giant tin can with wings. A tin can that is supposed to carry me over the Philippine Sea from Sydney to Shanghai.

The clock on the rectangular screen in front of me reads five hours and eighteen minutes. Time moves thick and heavy in this floating-real-world time capsule. Like the Elmer's glue that I would sink my hands into in my childhood days. Enough minutes and seconds to think about quite literally every minute and second of the past six months.

As we drift apath to the Philippine archipelago Shanghai grows closer, steadily and excruciatingly slow. "Shanghai is not far from Korea" I think, as my gaze glides across the lit up screen.

South Korea, a place that has witnessed me transform into a version of myself which had long been buried underneath piles of rubble and ash, left behind by the cataclysms of my youth.

As I sit squished between two strangers, who, for some reason, are also embarking upon this gum-stretching journey to Shanghai from Oceania on a random Thursday at eleven in the morning, I find myself reminiscing moments which felt so vivid I wish I could download their atmosphere onto a hard drive in my brain to immortalize their still flickering bliss.

Many of these moments on my journey involved me looking up at the moon. Or the sun. Or a bug. And the other half involved people.

Sharing a boiling meal out of one bubbly pot with the family you made in a foreign country. A passerby offering you their umbrella in the rain. Giggling with the guy you met at an art gallery as you leap mid air during a silent disco. Being gifted free food to try as you eat alone in a basement restaurant. Spinning ten times before you throw off a frisbee to the strangers who just turned friends. Running up a mountain trek at 4am with someone you met a week ago. A dwarfish man helping you retrieve your bag charms from within a bench in front of a bookstore you just spent your entire afternoon reading in. Screaming along to "I Want to Know What Love Is" as you and your friends stick your fingers into the piercing airflow outside the Toyota Yaris you just rented for the day. Sharing hands with your newly acquired friend from Japan, your left arm squeamishly flopping behind your head, as you lunge into the paralyzing cold of an Australian waterfall in winter. Helping the friend whom you just made after swimming with whales pull off their wetsuit in the middle of a parking lot. Being pulled in for a saw-dusty group hug in between cracked and chopped trees as ants draw circles on your shoecaps. Laughing until you choke as your new hiking buddy mumbles out of sheer exhaustion. Staring at iridescent jellyfish dancing weightlessly while you hold hands with someone who makes you feel at home in a place that you are not.

I could probably fill ten more pages with moments like these. They collect in my chest like pressed flowers in a herbarium. It's the kind of moments that make you pause months later, overwhelmed with the amount of chest-hollowing beauty you were allowed to experience. How much connection you stumbled into.

Isn't it beautiful how our lives are essentially an endless stack of expansive memories like these? How throughout our - in context - pretty short visit on this blue bulbous sphere we call home, we all build a museum of intricate wonders uniquely our own? It could be the way light falls perfectly on a leaf in the dawn of day or the taste of thick humid evening air as you strut home after having said goodbye to someone who inspired you. Essence that can't be quite captured or shared. Something that thrives in the margins between memory and feeling.

I gently tap on the illuminated plastic in front of me. The time reads four hours and twenty-five minutes.

The Biological Lense

They say the eyes are windows to the soul but I think they're something even more extraordinary, they are each a unique camera that has never existed before and will never exist again. Every iris is a one-of-a-kind aperture, every pupil dilates to let in light that will be processed by a mind unlike any other in history.

When you photograph eyes in macro detail you are not just capturing anatomy. You are documenting the very instruments through which entire universes of experiences are filtered. These are the lenses that have watched sunrises that moved someone to tears, that have seen loved ones pass away, that have witnessed moments of heartbreak no one else will ever know.

That brown eye flecked with gold? It belongs to someone who sees spring differently than you do. Those long lashes have blinked away tears of anguish and detriment you have no idea about. That particular shade of green in my mother’s eyes has reflected trees and skies from a childhood spent in places most could not imagine today.

There's something about the way children encounter the world that adults spend decades trying to remember. They haven't yet learned to dismiss the ordinary as unworthy of attention. A puddle becomes an ocean, shadows on walls transform into dancing creatures and the sound of wind through leaves carries conversations from invisible friends.

My best friend’s chestnut tinted eyes reveal someone who collects moments most people discard - the precise way a pigeon lifts her foot as it struts along a paved road, or how the multicoloured bead-curtain on her neighbour’s window reminds her of pastel candy necklaces. Her irises hold copper threads that seem to catch light like coiled wire in mercury bulbs.

The blue eyes that carry a certain melancholy see beauty in places others find unsettling. They're drawn to the shadows between streetlights, the way faces distort in subway car windows, how music venues look empty after everyone has gone home. There's something about sadness that sharpens vision - these eyes catch the loneliness in Edward Munch's ‘The Scream’ and find kinship in the rawness of live concerts where strangers scream lyrics together in the dark.

My mother's eyes carry the strangest gift: they've accumulated decades of experience yet somehow gotten more curious, not less. The golden flecks in her hazel irises seem to multiply each year, as if wonder itself is sedimentary, building up in layers. She still giggles at sunsets, still finds non-animals in cloud formations with the dedication of a professional zoologist.

Each pair does the same impossible work: transforming light into stories - the same way children turn pieces of trashed cardboard into rocketships to embark on lunar expeditions atop blotchy and tattered living room carpets.

Every macro shot reveals intricate landscapes. Irises aren't just colored circles - they're topographical maps with valleys and ridges, patterns as unique as fingerprints. Some look like abstract paintings while others resemble aerial views of river deltas or dried earth.

But it's the stories behind each individual lense that fascinate me most. These eyes have been the first things lovers saw in the morning. They've watched children take first steps, witnessed final breaths, seen sunsets from hospital windows and city skylines from airplane seats. They've cried over books, sparkled with inside jokes and rolled with teenage vexations. Each eye is an archive of moments, not just what was seen, but how it was seen. The same sunset looks different through eyes clouded in grief versus eyes bright with new love.

What moves me the most is realizing that these eyes will never see themselves the way I see them through my lens. They can glimpse their reflection in mirrors and see themselves in photographs but they'll never experience their own gaze from the outside. They'll never see how their pupils contract in bright light or how their expression shifts when they're lost in thought.

We spend our entire lives looking out through these windows but we can never truly see the windows themselves.

It's the ultimate blind spot - we use our eyes to see everything except our own seeing.

When I show people macro photographs of their own eyes, there's always a moment of startled recognition followed by something deeper, some kind of wonder at the strangeness of being housed inside a body, of experiencing the world through this peculiar biological camera.

Now show the same photograph to different people and watch their eyes while they look at eyes. My mother sees storm clouds brewing in brown irises. My coworker insists they can see unicorns galloping through golden flecks and my friend Elo, the one enamoured by the way pigeons wobble their heads as they pace, she looks at hazel eyes and sees forests where each color change marks a different season, a green ocean where deer made of light particles leap between shades of amber and green.

Every eye tells me that there are as many worlds as there are ways of seeing. The child seeing monsters in pupils and cookies in corneas, my friend discovering beauty in places others call ugly - they're all right. They're all seeing truly, just differently.

In our age of division and misunderstanding, we need to remember that we're all just doing our best to make sense of reality through our own unique apertures. The same light hits all our retinas but the stories we create from it - unicorns and storm clouds and sleeping monsters - those are entirely our own.

The next time someone sees the world differently than you do, remember: they're not wrong. They're just looking through a different camera, one shaped by experiences you'll never have, calibrated by a consciousness you'll never fully understand.

And that's not an error in the system of being human, it's the most beautiful feature of it all.