Seeking Repose: Justin Chung
Seeking Repose is a concept that explores spaces through a new lens: that of respite and recharge. Investigating how spatial influences make for inward reflection and repose from daily life, we take our latest entry back to Los Angeles, to visit photographer and long-time collaborator Justin Chung at home.
“I appreciate homes that have a feeling to them, more than one time period or approach to design. A timelessness and a way of aging gracefully—I find myself drawn to cottages of Scotland and Ireland, farmhouses, homes that embrace their settings rather than trying to impose something onto them.”
To experience photographer Justin Chung’s work is to feel the elements that were on the other side of his lens: the sharp light of the sun, a breeze in the air, or the scent of a plant that has made it into a shot. For Chung, the natural elements present on a given shoot are characters in the story he’s telling with a series of photographs: “I’m self taught as a photographer, and so my base setting for lighting in photography was the haze of San Francisco, where I’m from. Moving to New York and then to LA—it took me a while to learn these very different qualities of light, but now I embrace it: that quality of light can help tell a story.”
In his own home, Chung and his wife Emily have stripped back the house they own to its original framework. “It’s a modest craftsman house perched on top of a hill, so the backyard is really what we’re inspired by—it has more square footage than the house itself.” The two of them have brought back a harmony between the interior and the backyard; letting light and warmth in through natural elements exposed wherever possible.
Case in point: their dining room, a gathering point in the house, is flooded with natural light, surrounded by gauzy curtains to let it in, and houses a long FRAMA Farmhouse Table surrounded by Folding Flat Chairs and 0405 Glassware so as to be ready to gather round as a family whenever they have the opportunity.
There’s a parallel between the exposed beams in the dining room and the Farmhouse table—both pared down to the materials themselves. Chung grew up in the city in San Francisco, and credits Emily with bringing time in nature and around animals into their lives. Their home is in the Highland Park neighbourhood of LA, and they now have horses thirty minutes away from the house.
“We learned that the zoning of the homes around here goes way back, and ours is zoned to allow one horse on the property (laughs). There’s not actually space for that, but the area is rooted historically in a more rural lifestyle.
I’m a city kid at heart, so having chickens and fresh eggs was a bit of a wakeup call at first. There was an adjustment period to the routines that these things introduce to your day, but now they are really what make a house a home to me.”
With hectic schedules, this access to nature and a home that acts as a sanctuary of sorts is important to Chung—the idea of repose is carefully protected for family time, and carved out intentionally from a calendar that often documents the routines and homes of other artists and creatives. The parallels between busy lives and the care that goes into creating spaces of respite emerges—and is clearly visible in the warmth, calm, and energy of Chung’s photographs, whether capturing this feeling is intentional or not.
“I met this lighting designer once who told me that his schedule—each day—was crazy, and that he found it impossible to keep up with routines. What he did was keep his summers a sanctuary: he was from Rhode Island, and would go spend the summer at home every year, and not try to find that peace within his schedule the rest of the year.
For me, that translates to grounding my routine in the weekend. Weekdays are stacked for me in a way that makes it so I can’t really have a set routine. I’ve tried hard to create rules and boundaries, but every day is so different—instead, I protect the weekend as my time for routine, and time off to be with my family.”
In 2014, Chung founded Faculty Department: an ongoing practice documenting artists and makers around the world. The project has published two books, featuring the work of Ally Walsh and Casey Wojtalewicz of Canyon Coffee, Evan Kinori, and artist John Zabara in addition to FRAMA founder Niels Stroyer Christopherson. This brought Chung to Copenhagen to photograph Christopherson and the FRAMA team over ten years ago—the beginning of a longstanding collaborative relationship.
With hectic schedules, this access to nature and a home that acts as a sanctuary of sorts is important to Chung—the idea of repose is carefully protected for family time, and carved out intentionally from a calendar that often documents the routines and homes of other artists and creatives. The parallels between busy lives and the care that goes into creating spaces of respite emerges—and is clearly visible in the warmth, calm, and energy of Chung’s photographs, whether capturing this feeling is intentional or not.
