Forty-six years is a long time to stay away from the place you were born. For photographer, filmmaker, and DePaul University professor James Choi, returning to Seoul in 2024 after leaving as a five-year-old in 1978 was never just a research trip — it was a reckoning. What he found there, camera in hand, became Seoul Days and Nights, a new photo book from Trope that captures one of the world’s most dynamic cities in a way you won’t find in any travel algorithm.
A City That Holds Its Contradictions Lightly
Seoul doesn’t hide the fact that it contains multitudes. Ancient palaces sit in the middle of glass-and-steel business districts. Older generations find their rhythms in spaces designed for the young. Walking the city for the first time in nearly five decades, Choi wasn’t looking for those contrasts — they simply refused to be ignored.
“You literally walk out your door, and it’s right in front of you,” he told host Casey Fatchett on the Nerdy Photographer Podcast. “Like, so obnoxiously in your face.” What struck him wasn’t the tension between old and new so much as the ease with which the city holds both — the acceptance, as he put it, “of how those two things sort of intertwine with each other.”
Choi’s background as a filmmaker gave him a compositional instinct that translated directly to the streets. But he’s candid that his approach to this project was more instinctive than calculated. He wasn’t shooting for a book. He was just walking, and reacting, like a kid seeing something new for the first time.
The Disappearing Mom-and-Pop
One of the most affecting threads running through Seoul Days and Nights is the slow erosion of the small, family-run food business — a phenomenon that will resonate with anyone who has watched a neighborhood city shift under the pressure of tourism and commercial development.
What Choi found, though, was that Seoul’s food culture has a density and vitality that resists easy narrative. “Every store is either a cafe or some sort of food,” he said. “You can go down a neighborhood street and find a restaurant in the basement of an apartment.” The sheer abundance of it — and the quality — made stepping into one of these small places feel less like dining out and more like being invited into someone’s home.
The essay in the book touches on what starts to disappear when that texture gets sanded away by commercialism. It’s the same story we know from countless cities: what gets lost isn’t just a type of restaurant, it’s the particular character of a neighborhood that those spaces create.
Nunchi and the Ethics of Looking
Perhaps the most unexpected concept to emerge from the conversation is nunchi — the Korean social skill of reading a room without words. It’s the ability to sense the dynamics of a space, understand the unspoken hierarchy, and know what to do before anyone has to say anything. Choi’s mother identified it in him as a child, though he didn’t fully understand it until much later.
For street photographers, the parallel is almost too exact. The best street photography depends on exactly this — an acute, wordless attunement to how people are moving, how energy is shifting, where something is about to happen. But Choi’s experience of nunchi hasn’t made him bolder on the street; it’s made him more careful.
“That’s made me very fearful in a lot of ways,” he admitted. “I’m always more hesitant — so a lot of my stuff tends to be further away.” The social awareness that lets him read a scene also makes him reluctant to intrude on one. There’s a philosophical tension in that, and it runs quietly through the whole book: the most observant person in the room is often the last person to make a move.
The Time Capsule Argument
Choi is clear about what he hopes Seoul Days and Nights becomes over time — a record of a city at a specific moment, unfiltered and unposed, that grows more valuable the further the city moves from it. He’d been looking at street photographs of Seoul from the 1950s through the ’80s, and was struck by how differently the city read then, and how grateful he was those images existed.
“Street photography is that we get to capture time in a very unfiltered way,” he said. In an era when every photo posted to social media is curated, posed, and optimized, that matters more than ever.
For people who have never been to Seoul, he hopes the book does something more than inspire a trip — he hopes it opens a door to the texture of daily Korean life that exists beneath the K-pop and the Squid Game references and the Michelin-starred restaurant lists. And for people who live there? He suspects that in a few years, they’ll look at it the way we look at great documentary photographs from the past — as a window back into a world that was changing faster than anyone realized.
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Episode Promos
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About My Guest
James Choi grew up a latchkey kid in Chicago. His parents immigrated from Korea when he was five and worked six days a week, so from age six and Seven he was alone taking the bus, walking the city, learning to read people and places and light. He didn’t know it then, but he was already doing what he’d spend his life doing: observing. Photography and eventually filmmaking came from that.
His work has earned Awards at SXSW, Slamdance and Chicago International Film Festival. As an educator, James is also an assistant Professor at DePaul University where he founded Indie Studio, supporting students making their first independent features.
Seoul Days and Nights is in some ways a return to the beginning except this time he was walking a city that looked like him.
Seoul Days and Nights is available now – you can get it on Amazon. James Choi can be found on Instagram at @JCPOV.
