Drawing with Light: Weonbae Park’s Search for Meaning in Everyday Life

At the World Grand Prix Photography Awards 2025 Winter Season, photographer Weonbae Park was awarded the Gold Award in Black & White & Fine Art Photography – Silhouettes for the work People Silhouette.

Recognised not for spectacle but for philosophical depth, People Silhouette presents a quiet yet powerful meditation on what photography fundamentally is—and what it can still be in an age saturated with images.

Rather than competing with painting through excess technique or visual shock, Weonbae Park’s work turns inward. His silhouette photography asserts that the essence of photography lies not in imitation or provocation, but in the fleeting instant when light itself records emotion. Through restraint, timing, and attentiveness to everyday life, People Silhouette articulates a vision of photography as an art of perception—one that transforms the ordinary into shared meaning at the speed of light.

Q: What message or feeling do you hope your photography conveys to viewers?

Weonbae:

Hyperrealist painting is often regarded as posing a formidable challenge to photography’s position as an autonomous art form. This is largely because everything photography is capable of achieving can, in principle, be rendered through painting—sometimes with even greater technical precision. As a result, the admiration once reserved for the photographic image may be redirected, in amplified form, towards the painter who reproduces the same visual reality through painstaking manual labour.

In response, contemporary photographic art may have been driven towards increasingly extreme or provocative directions in an attempt to reaffirm its artistic legitimacy. Paradoxically, however, this pursuit may have blurred the distinction between painting and photography to such an extent that photography has, in some cases, struggled to safeguard its own artistic identity.

Yet the true artistry of photography lies elsewhere. It resides in the very instant the shutter is released, when light itself inscribes the scene onto the image. It is found in the photographer’s ability to condense a pre-felt emotion and an inwardly perceived moment into a single frame, captured instantaneously. Photography has the unique capacity to extract narrative from the ordinary—to transform the mundane into a shared emotional experience. It is precisely through this process that the essential distinction between painting and photography may be most clearly articulated.

To render everyday life momentarily as meaning, and to draw it with light in the briefest fraction of time—this, ultimately, constitutes the true identity of photography. When one is able to discover moments of profound beauty within the fleeting intervals of daily life and render them at the speed of light, photography transcends mere documentation and fully assumes its place as an art form.

Q: In your view, what role does photography play in today’s world?

Weonbae:

To render everyday life momentarily as meaning, and to draw it with light in the briefest fraction of time—this, ultimately, constitutes the true identity of photography. When one is able to discover moments of profound beauty within the fleeting intervals of daily life and render them at the speed of light, photography transcends mere documentation and fully assumes its place as an art form.

In People Silhouette, Weonbae Park reminds us that photography’s power does not come from excess, but from attention. By stripping the image down to light, form, and timing, his work reclaims photography’s quiet authority—its ability to witness, condense, and reveal meaning in the most ordinary moments.

In a visual culture driven by speed and saturation, People Silhouette stands as a pause: a moment where photography returns to its most essential act—drawing with light, and allowing meaning to emerge.

Follow the Photographer

After joining a university photography club in 1987, I fell in love with photography. As an amateur photographer and a lover of photography, I always find joy in capturing deeper and more profound meaning in a single shot than in a ten-hour video. My goal is to live as a photographer who conveys the meaning and value of existence in a single shot.

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