Word: lee
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...chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In that role he turned out shows and books that powerfully influenced our understanding of what the camera could do. In particular he championed the groundbreaking work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and William Eggleston, photographers who, as he wrote, had turned documentary photography "toward more personal ends." He once compared camera art simply to "the act of pointing." He pointed, too, expertly, to pictures that he knew the world should know about...
...Then, in the early 1990s, he actually visited Pyongyang, first as a student and then as an official for Chongyron. "It was 180 degrees different from what I was taught in schools," Lee remembers. "They didn't teach how miserable life was there...
When he was younger, Lee Chek says, he wanted to be a soldier for Kim Jong Il, and "fight Japan." He'd have been fighting from behind enemy lines, of course, because the ethnic-Korean Lee was born and raised in Japan, where has always lived. The 35-year-old is a third-generation zainichi, one of 600,000 ethnic Koreans who dwell in Japan. And, like many zainichi, he grew up identifying with the North Korean regime. Lee attended Korean-language schools run by Chongyron, the fiercely pro-Pyongyang Korean residents association in Japan, where he was taught that...
...Though he still retains affection for North Korea, Lee saw Chongyron as fatally beholden to Kim Jong Il, and in 2001 he broke with the organization, becoming a freelance journalist. (Lee Chek is a pen name he uses to protect relatives still living in North Korea from retribution.) Chongyron - which functions as North Korea's de-facto diplomatic voice in Japan - took away his North Korean passport, and he hasn't been back to Pyongyang. Permitted to take Korean or Japanese nationality, last year Lee took South Korean citizenship in order to travel abroad...
...protection of an ethnic association, much less one tied to a dictator. The gradual rapprochement between North and South Korea has also rendered Chongyron superfluous. "When the South and the North come together over there, you don't have to pick one or the other over here," says Lee...