Laura Elizabeth Pohl is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, writer and communications consultant who focuses on exploring different ways of telling stories about humanitarian issues. Once a business reporter in Seoul, South Korea she left her career to study for an M.A. in photojournalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Since then, she has transitioned her photojournalism background into more advocacy focused work and has established herself in the realm of humanitarian photography. She currently resides in Cape Town, South Africa with her husband. LauraElizabethPohl.com
I reached out to Laura because of her exhibition “A Long Separation” which is a portrait series that highlights the stories of South Koreans separated from their families in North Korea since the Armistice in 1953. Currently, 60% of the thousands of people still divided from loved ones are over 80 years old. As these family members pass away, so will all direct ties and living memories between the two Koreas.
As I am currently exploring in my practice, art that dwells in the disparate spaces between pain and healing and unveiling the narratives residing in those moments of transition — I was struck by how Pohl gracefully and intimately connected her work to the personal history of her family (her great Uncle was separated from his family while fleeing the North).
As a first-generation immigrant, I’ve also found myself navigating that same space of taking generational trauma from my own family’s history of separation due to the Korean War and seeking pathways to healing through my art practice. There are undeniable parallels to stories of divided families in times of war, to the often violent and war-like experiences of families who currently identify as undocumented, displaced, and seeking asylum that have or are experiencing separation along the U.S. and Mexico borders today.
This interview is an edited version of a Zoom meeting (i.e., webcam conference call) I had with Laura, where we spoke about the connection between our two portrait projects and the vital role a foundational ethical framework plays when amplifying voices within ethnographic pieces in our interdisciplinary fields.
ADELE KENWORTHY:
At this stage in my project, I'm not focusing exactly on how an image will look but researching in what ways can I help facilitate a framework that can build a visual heritage for these families experiencing separation.
The impetus for this concept came from my visceral response to the Trump administration’s “Zero Tolerance Policy” in 2018 – prosecuting not only all undocumented migrants and asylum-seeking persons, but especially families with young children that resulted in the unwarranted separations. I read of one instance during the pilot run of the program, a breastfeeding mother separated from her infant. Watching modern history play out made me draw parallels in the power dynamics surrounding borders and my own family's experience of separation during the Korean War. My Grandfather fled the North hoping to go back for the rest of his family, but he never saw them again.
Lately, I've been grappling in my practice in wanting to take these sites of pain and help transform them into sites of healing, so I've been interested in creating tintype portraiture using vintage equipment to offer portraits to families experiencing separation, where the photographs can be mailed to other members of their families in their home country. And by partnering with migrant centric human rights organizations to create a secure digital archive as another point of access for reconnection or reunification.
Having said all that, as your advocacy work evolved, how have you navigated your personal narrative and the way it affects your visual perspective and how you use the lens as a tool?
LAURA ELIZABETH POHL:
When I started my project on divided families in Korea, I didn't know where it was going to go at all. You sound like you know exactly what you're going to do, you know you’re going to do tintype portraits, you want to involve organizations that can advocate, and you want to give portraits to people. It sounds like you have a clear idea, I didn't have as clear of an idea I just had a very strong feeling that someone needed to do these stories because it's my family story. It’s my Great Uncle who is separated from his family in the North, it sounds like the same as your Grandfather. He thought he was leaving for a short time and then he never saw his parents or his siblings again. He's the oldest son, you know what that means in Korean culture, a horrible, horrible feeling for him. So, for me I just felt this very strong impetus to get these stories down – not even out yet – but just to record them for history.
So, my Great Uncle was the very first person that I interviewed and photographed for this and in a way I'm glad I did because he passed six or seven months later. I'm glad I got his story, on the other hand if I'd waited, he would have been dead, but I didn't really know what my visual aesthetic was going to be. He was the first person I did, and I did all kinds of things with flash and with natural light and trying all different kinds of things – the bounce – and so I didn't end up using his portrait because aesthetically it just ended up not fitting with everyone else. In that way I regret it because you may find this too – the first few people you photograph could end up just being experiments in the end because you're trying to figure out what your visual language is going to be. It’s great that you know your medium, you're doing tintype, I didn't even know if I was going to do vertical or horizontal, I didn’t know anything about what my visual narrative was going to be, it was just that I felt such a strong personal pull to do this project.
AK:
Do you experience any dissonance between your ethics across your multidisciplinary practice and are there points of intersection that resonate with you?
LP:
So sometimes there is a bit of dissonance, I don't know if you saw this essay, I wrote a few years ago about ethics and the humanitarian photography space versus documentary – I feel at least several times a month someone emails me about that and wants to have a chat. Are you in an MFA program or you in an MA in Journalism program?
AK:
I'm in an MFA in Social Practice Art program.
LP:
It sounds like they're making you think a lot about ethics, which is good. When I was in school I I got my Masters in Photojournalism and we learned a very strict code of ethics, some of which I already knew because I'd been a business reporter before, and it's the same kind of ethics. Visuals have a little more stringent parameters I think, but then when I switched over to humanitarian photography it was totally different. Every organization is different, some organizations don't think about ethics at all – which I found appalling – and then I was in that situation that you read about. It was horrible, I think in the end I did a horrible thing, I wish I made a different choice, but even when I look back at and ask myself ‘what could I have done differently, what could I have done differently’ just not have taken any photos? (pause) Yeah, that was such a heartbreaking situation.
You read the article, so you know where my ethics are now, what my standards are – when I'm working at least with nonprofits and NGOs. Over my years of working with a lot of different NGOs and nonprofits, it’s evolved even more where I feel very strongly now that when you're working with marginalized communities or communities especially where you have a lot more social and economic power than the people you're photographing – it’s very important to involve those people in your process. Involve them in the editing process, let them have some control over the story to make it more of a collaboration than not. It's not always possible, I know it's not always possible, but it's something that should be at the forefront of your mind.
If you're not doing strictly journalism – which has a totally different set of ethics – then it's something you need to think about. Even when I was working on my project about the separated family members, I sent portraits to everyone, I let people look at the back of my camera. The very last person I photographed was a Korean American man in Baltimore and I sent him his portrait. He had told his Grandson he didn’t like it, and his Grandson told me, “I don't think my Grandpa wants to say anything to you, but I know he would be happier if we retook his picture and used a different one in the exhibition.” And I was like “Okay Laura, now you're going to live what you say,” which is really involve people in the process, and if they don't like what you've selected, then you change it. I loved that picture of him – the first picture – I really loved it because it seemed to show his emotion a lot more than the picture that I ended up using, which is the second picture, which is the one he preferred. I think the big difference in the feeling between the pictures was that I took the first picture after our interview and so he was kind of feeling the emotions of his story, and the second one was I just showed up at his house, we went on his back porch and took the picture. So, I think that was the difference, but you know what, he was happy and that does matter to me. It does matter – he actually came to my exhibition, so he came to the stop in Ellicott City, Maryland and then he came to the stop in Baltimore also. He's the only person in the exhibition who actually came because he's the only one who lived in the area, and he was really happy to see his picture there. I was happy, sure I think the other picture is better, but is it more important what I think or what he thinks? He was gracious enough to share his story. So yes, there are different ethics and even my own ethics have evolved, since I wrote that piece.
AK:
One of my other questions was about that piece and how you apply your mental checklist to the portrait setting, is it different?
LP:
There's not, it's it really is the same. I started working on that project around the time of that incident that happened – it was in 2014. At that time, I was thinking so much about really being ethical and making people feel included, but what felt different about interviewing and photographing the people in Korea versus the one person I got in the United States who was David. David had talked about the history more; I don't know if that's the influence of being in America where people are generally a little more open. In Korea, people don't really talk about this issue of divided families, and a few of the people I interviewed, I got the feeling they really hadn't talked about it with anyone almost ever. In fact, there was one man that I interviewed, the man's wife was also in the room listening and she told me later, “I thought I knew his whole story, but he told you a lot more than he's ever told me.” I think it's just because he really wanted to be heard, and people just weren't as willing to listen to him there – for whatever reason. Even I saw that in my own family with my Great Uncle. I've lived in Korea a total of three and half years as an adult, and I would spend holidays at his house because he's the oldest male relative and everyone goes in their house for Chuseok, where we go to his house and you have the portrait set up to honor your ancestors. He had that set up for his whole family in the North who he hasn’t seen since 1949. Inevitably at these family gatherings, he would end up crying and he’d want to talk about his family, but my cousins, my uncle, my aunt – no one wanted to hear it. They’ve been hearing this for 30, 40, or 50 years at every family gathering, I can imagine that does get tiring, but for me it was still very new. I felt so much empathy for him.
AK:
And he still feels it so strongly even though it’s been so long.
LP:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. When died he was 90 and he was still feeling like the worst son in the world for leaving behind his parents and his four younger sisters. I think in Korea, maybe their relatives, friends, family were kind of sick of hearing it. So, when I came and I'm like, “tell me your story” they just wanted to say everything, even things they've never told those close to them. Maybe it also helps that I was going away, that I wasn’t going to remind them.
If you're also doing interviews with people, you really might find people are willing to pour their heart out to you, not just because they want their story heard, but because you're also a person who is going to go away.
AK:
The traveling aspect of your divided families project really stood out to me because there's something so powerful in connecting with people in such a transient way, and there's this different kind of burden to carry when you're experiencing that sort of loss. You talked about it a little bit in your WYPR segment with Sheilah Kast, but I'd love to know more about artistic process of why you chose something like a traveling truck exhibition.
LP:
I always knew I wanted to do something in a truck because I felt it would be accessible. I didn't want anyone to feel excluded because museums haven’t typically been inclusive spaces for most of society. I thought truck totally approachable, it's basically a U-Haul truck that's been covered over with the portraits – totally approachable – but I originally wanted to do it inside the truck. But the insurance was going to be too high – which I didn't even think of insurance – also I have had to made it make it ADA accessible. You have to have a foot of ramp for each inch that's up, the lowest height of a truck I found was 32 inches, so would have meant like a 32-foot-long ramp.
Then I decided, let me put it on the outside which actually was better because then people can walk around. I intentionally went to public libraries to make it be a community space. And I also picked libraries that were near large Korean or Korean American populations. I looked at the most recent census data, that's why some of the towns seem random. That’s how I picked most of the places that I stopped with my truck. I honestly didn't get this part of my exhibition until someone came to the stop in Ellicott City and told me, “you know what's great about your truck is that it's crossing borders in a way that these people in the North can't cross borders.” I really wanted to drive the truck just to make it more accessible to people, and I was also hoping that as I drove up I-95, that some people would see me and photograph it – there was a big hashtag on the truck, but that didn't happen. Although one person who visited me at one of the stops in Maryland said, “Oh my God, I saw your truck on I-95 the other day and that's why I'm here!” That’s why I did the truck, but another part of the exhibition were phone numbers you could call, and you could listen to excerpts of the interviews in either Korean or English. That was also very important to me because, it's another thing that divided family members can't do –you can't just pick up the phone and call someone, and yet people could come to the exhibition dial these numbers on their phone and hear voices as if they were calling them. I wanted people to go through those motions to feel how easy it is for them and how impossible it is for the people that are pictured.
AK:
As you were driving up I-95 and going to different towns, were their reactions different depending on like which town you went to?
LP:
The main thing that made the reactions different is what kind of publicity the libraries did. There were some libraries that were really great about the publicity and their level of enthusiasm in their publicity. I actually provided every library with a publicity pack, so they didn't have to do anything – I wrote the tweets, I wrote the Facebook posts, I have the pictures, I made posters, I had everything for them already with what I thought was the proper tone of enthusiasm to get people excited. Some of the libraries changed things or just didn't use what I sent them – which is also fine – some did better, some did not as great, and I felt some didn't care as much.
But other libraries cared a lot, some of the best reactions I got were in Fort Lee, New Jersey which is right outside of New York City, there's a huge Korean American population. Two or three newspapers showed up to the exhibition, a Korean American on the City Council showed up, I mean there were a lot of people that came. I had a clicker to count how many people showed up, so that one had around one-hundred-thirty people, which was the most at any one stop. It was a lot of people; it was a lot of talking. My husband and I and the assistant that I had in Korea – I flew her to the US so she could be part of exhibition – we were all constantly talking to people, explaining things. I remember that was one of the libraries that hosted me for talk afterward. My husband, Yula, my assistant, and I were getting ready to go to dinner first and then come back to do my talk. As we were going to the restaurant, someone had showed up really late – a young Asian guy – and his shoulders were shaking. He was crying so hard. I went up to him and I said, “Are you okay? Can I help you?” He's like, “No, it's just all so moving. I had no idea this happened in Korea, I just called my friend – he’s Korean – and he's coming over now to look at the exhibition with me.” And I said, “You know I'm happy to talk, if you want to talk more about this because I'm the artist.” He responded, “No, no no, it's okay, it's okay.” He just kept crying; he did not stop crying.
There were quite a few people who cried, I had an interactive part of the exhibition where people could write messages on post-it notes and leave it on the back of the truck. The portraits were on the sides and on the back was my artist statement and the project explanation in Korean and English, then lots of white space where people could leave post-it notes. At each stop, we gather up the post-it notes, at the next one put them on, and then let people add more. People have so many messages about their own stories of division – slavery, different wars like Laos and Vietnam, family divisions because you're not getting along for whatever reason… so it was really interesting to me because I hadn't thought there were going to be so many stories of division like that, but there are. It's actually quite a universal story, unfortunately.
AK:
Were you able to do anything with the post-it notes?
LP:
I have them, I don't know what to do with them now. I have everything from the exhibition. I'd like to do something with all the materials I've gathered, but I need a partner to help me with the educational side of things and I don't have time to do that right now.
AK:
When creating your work, have you experienced in any of your projects that seemed to take away parts of you more than build, and projects that further rooted your voice and reaffirmed your inner truths?
LP:
Part of the artistic process for me in this project in particular was at times feeling more energized and rooted in the stories, and at other times feeling like “where is this going?” It's all up and down at least for me, but that's usually how it is for any project. The beginning is so exciting, when I went to Korea for my first trip – I was working with a different assistant at the time. He took me to this one place where a lot of divided family members lived, and he was supposed to scout for me and layout the groundwork so that I could walk into a comfortable situation, but it was not comfortable at all. I just thought, “Oh my God, if this project keeps going like this, what am I going to do? I'm spending my personal money on this, these people don't really want to talk to me, they're very reluctantly posing for pictures. I don't want to force people to do this, but on the other hand you know Korean culture, if people say they're going to do something for you, they'll usually do it even if they in the end don't really want to do it. I didn't want to force them, but on my end, I know I have to go through with it because that's culturally the right thing to do.
The most rooted I felt in the work was when I was working with my assistant, Yula. She helped me on the last trip I had in Korea, when my husband and I actually moved there for a month. What was so great about Yula was she really felt the stories. Once I worked with her, I realized the assistant that I had hired before wasn't as grounded in the work and didn't feel as personally about it as I did. Maybe it's impossible to feel as personally about it if it's not your own family, but when I worked with Yula, we would go into the interviews and I'd be crying and she'd be crying. Working with her was just fabulous and made me feel a lot more rooted in the work and in the issue because she really felt it. She actually didn't know much at all about divided families, a lot of Korean people don't know. They see the reunions happen every once in a while, but they don't really pay attention, especially for young people – it’s something that's in the past. It's something that they don't really want to think about because it's also a little bit shameful – the country is divided, it’s the only country with this strong and long of a political division in the modern world. That's a little bit shameful to some Koreans.
It was really great working with her and then when I came back to the US and I started to get my vision together for the traveling truck exhibition, I was just so excited to finally share what I've been working on for so long.
AK:
How did you find Yula?
LP:
I used to be a reporter in Korea and I asked one of my reporter friends, a New York Times reporter in Seoul. I said “Hey Chai Son Bae, I need a new assistant who can help me, can you recommend anyone?” And he said, “There’s this new girl that I met the foreign correspondents club and she's great.” So, he connected me with Yula and she was amazing. I think if you have people helping you with your project at all, it is so important who you hire or who you corral to volunteer with you. She helped make my project more amazing than it would have been.
AK:
I know we talked about this a little bit already, but the blessing and curse in the momentum of socially engaged work when amplifying otherwise silence voices is a lingering potential in that narrative going in a direction we might have not initially intended, how have you amplified the voices of the communities that you've engaged with also protecting them?
LP:
I felt that very keenly with the people that I interviewed and photographed. The great thing was -- or maybe not so great thing – is that a lot of these people were quite bold. My experience with the older generation is that they will say anything, quite a lot of people had a political message about what the South Korean government was or wasn't doing. I included almost none of that in my captions and my interview excerpts that were public because even though I know they felt very comfortable saying that to me, they signed release forms, and they knew that anything they said to me could be public – I felt quite protective in making sure that if they have living relatives in the North, those people won't somehow be affected by any political statement.
This is something I learned when I did my first big project in Korea on North Korean defectors adjusting to life in South Korea, in 2005-2006. It took me a long time to gain the trust of North Koreans living in Seoul – and then once I did, it took even more time for them to feel they could say anything to me because they all had relatives still in the North. They were afraid of anything they said could make it back to their relatives in the North. So that was something I was very cognizant of working on this project, even though people felt free to express themselves with me – in one way you could say I censored them, in another way you could say I protected them because I know what the consequences could be an even though I know they know the consequences too.
This gets into geopolitics a little bit but me being an American means that there's a wider stage for my message to go out in English versus when they say something in Korean. That's also something I found out when I was a business reporter in Korea. I worked for Dow Jones Newswires and people/economists, whoever would talk to me, but I could tell they were more cautious about how they said things to me in English than when they talked to the Korean reporters in Korean. When it's in English, it just goes further in the world then when it's staying in Korea. I don't know if that's something you want to think about with your project too because they will speak to you in Spanish probably, but you'll be doing this project in English which means there's a bigger chance of the message going further just because so many more people speak English not as their native language, but as their second language.
AK:
I spoke to an anthropologist yesterday who teaches at GW. She's also a photographer and documentary filmmaker and she brought up this interesting point – I feel like I also read it in one of your blog posts – about knowing when to put the camera down. What is your process in knowing what is the right moment to capture and when is the right moment to listen?
LP:
If you have any doubt, just listen. You're doing a portrait project too which means you're probably not going to spend a ton of time shooting. When I was working on this project in particular, I would interview each person for about one to two hours and then a shoot could be anywhere from literally three minutes to at the most maybe ten minutes. A good ratio for hanging out, building trust, talking and really getting to know each other versus photographing especially for a portrait project – it’s probably like 90/10. Ninety percent, hanging out and getting to know people, and ten percent photographing. It's important if you really feel a bond with someone to run with it and remember they are human first. They’re human, we're human just be humans.
AK:
Have you been able to stay in touch with the people that you photographed in Korea?
LP:
At the time I did the exhibition, my mom and I called all of them to tell them exhibition was happening and some people never answered no matter how many times we called. I don't know what happened to them. The woman who got in the taxi, she had moved to a nursing home, so when we called her cell phone a nurse picked it up and said, “I can't let her talk to you only family can talk to her.” None of these people had email addresses, so I haven't kept in touch with anyone in Korea. I just got an email from David’s grandson last week. I did keep in touch with David a bit when I was in Baltimore. I wish there were some easier way to keep in touch, but they are older and I'm not 100% fluent in Korean, and some of them were very hard of hearing. Unless we write snail mail letters to each other now – if I visit Korea again, I'm definitely going to look for people. I'm sure I'll visit Korea at some point once this is all over, but I like trying to keep in touch with people if I can
AK:
Is there anything you wish I ask had that I haven't or anything you feel is meaningful to know that I haven't touched on?
LP:
What is your approach to your project? Are you going to the border or are you finding people elsewhere, what's your process?
AK:
It's still in the beginning stages and I'm looking for funding to hopefully go to border towns like El Paso and Juarez, and San Diego and Tijuana, connecting with nonprofits because they have that established trust with the community already, and just start talking and start the process that way. In my heart reunification is big for me because of my personal story, but maybe that might not be what's useful to them – so figuring out what in these portraits would be useful.
LP:
That's interesting what you said just reminded me of something that happened in my project and you kind of referenced it in a question, one thing that was unexpected when I started was how many people actually said they preferred not to be reunified or not to see their families again. It wasn't the majority, but there were quite a few people who said, “I don't want to because we can't do anything about it afterwards. If I see them, that's it and then what? Nothing. Everything goes back to exactly the way it was, there's literally nothing that I can do.”
In the case of one man, he had applied for reunions so many times and he always got rejected. He wanted to see his younger sister and – this is rare – but finally, someone from the South Korean Red Cross called him and told him “You really need to stop applying because your sister is married to a very high-ranking government official in North Korea, and if you keep applying it could put her in jeopardy.” So, he stopped, he said “That's all I need to know. She must be living a good life. I know that now, I don't want to make her life worse.” And a few other people said something along those lines too, “Probably they’re okay, I don't want to disrupt their life. My life is also okay…it's okay.”
AK:
That is so heartbreaking.
LP:
It’s really hard to hear that and I can't imagine not wanting to see someone, but then you think of the greater good, and affecting their life negatively. I hadn't expected that at all when I went into this project, I thought everyone would be “Yes, I want to be reunited.” I'm sure your project is going be different, parents and small children, but maybe there is someone who will say if I leave my child in the US, maybe they'll have a better life. I don't know, I don't know it gets impossible.