I am a German photographer based in Seoul/South Korea. When I started my photo project PAUSE to portray my local grungy neighborhood at the end of December 2020, Germany just had gone in another lockdown while South Korea had just introduced tighter rules because of the pandemic. Both countries had around 1000 Covid 19 cases a day then. In Germany that number meant deaths, while in Korea it was the number of new infections in the whole country.
Human life in those dark times was happening only privately behind doors and windows. Shops, bars, restaurants were either completely shut down or closed early. Usually busy nightlife and entertainment areas were deserted, and of course it helped that it was icy cold outside too.
Since that time in late December, I often walked around the Yangcheongu district after midnight to photograph the eerily silent city , which looked like an abandoned theater set. I was interested in the empty spaces of the (disappearing) neighborhoods full of patina, history and human traces.
The longer I roamed the same streets night after night, the more I felt like Bill Murray in the movie “Groundhog Day”. It seemed that I got to know every street, every corner and every stone in my neighborhood. Ironically, while I was photographing the abandoned streets and dystopian urban spaces of Seoul, I was actually much safer here than if I had been staying in my native Germany.
