YEONGWOL.- Artist Paul Weinberg is a featured artist and currently showing at the 24th DongGang International Photography Festival at the DongGang Museum of Photography in Yeongwol, Korea.
The festival is now open to the public and will run until the 11 of October, 2026.
This year’s main exhibition Horizontal Dialogue: Between Us is curated by independent curator and art director HeeJung Kim under the curatorial theme of The Silence that Shapes. The theme interrogates the existential terms by which human beings have come to understand the world. It explores how we read, shape and interpret nature through human-centric lenses.
The curatorial focus emphasises the discovery of the natural landscape and what our environment reveals when denuded of an overt human narrative, focusing a light on the silent, shaping forces of nature.
Rather than presenting African photography as a single regional category, the exhibition explores it as a living visual language shaped by history, society, and culture. Through shared themes of colonialism and independence, division and violence, memory and identity, it traces key developments in African photography while revealing resonances with Korea’s own historical experiences.
The exhibition highlights two major traditions: the studio photography culture that emerged in post-independence West Africa, where photography became a means of constructing new identities, and South African documentary photography, which confronts structural violence and collective memory. It also examines how contemporary African photography has expanded to address urban space, objects, and diaspora, positioning photography as a medium for interpreting history, memory, and power.
Together with the works of the Korean artists, the exhibition invites viewers to consider Africa and Korea not as subjects of comparison, but as equal participants in a shared dialogue about history, memory, and the social role of photography.
Featured artists: David Goldblatt, Edson Chagas, Hyuntaek Cho, Jo Ractliffe, Julian Kyusang Lee, Paul Weinberg, Pieter Hugo, Samuel Fosso, Sanl Sory, Santu Mofokeng, and Suntag Noh.
The DongGang International Photo Festival (DIPF) is one of South Korea's premier contemporary photography events, held annually in Yeongwol, Gangwon Province. Launched in 2002, the festival showcases global photography trends alongside the prestigious DongGang Photography Award, drawing artists and tourists to the picturesque ‘City of Photography’.
