One Tenth of an Honest Story
1. SNS
In this era, for someone like me, social media is a single window through which I can be seen.
The time when you could simply call something “art,” make photographs, and sell them is already over. Unless you are one of the photographers from the 1980s or 1990s who have already accumulated wealth, selling photographs or holding exhibitions in the digital age feels almost meaningless. Photography has become lighter, cheaper, and unbearably common. Editing methods have become excessively diverse. At least unlike painting, photography no longer feels easy to sell as a work in itself. Even those who still do so are often closer to satisfying their desire for prestige, supported by wealth they had already built.
Fashion photography and magazine work, especially when dealing with celebrities, are just as filthy as the entertainment industry itself. Most of it runs on school ties, regional ties, and personal connections. It is a marketplace already occupied. I have worked inside that network myself, which is why I know it so well. At least here, I want to remove the word “effort” entirely. Even bastards and thieves put in effort. Effort is not a virtue. It is a prerequisite.
In the end, commercial photographers who work with ordinary people survive by constantly attracting new clients and turning curiosity into commissions. But the market is flooded with similar-looking results, and the majority of the public lacks the ability to recognize subtle differences. As long as faces, bodies, and skin look well retouched, they are labeled “top-tier photographers.” That ignorance cancels out every real strength.
At the very least, I believed I was singular in this field. I had never seen anyone better than me. I believed I had an accumulated history and body of work, built through conviction, passion, values, vitality, sensitivity, and psychological depth, along with a clear sense of direction.
Unfortunately, for someone like me, distinctive, unsociable, and blunt, social media became a double-edged sword. The more I posted and shared, the more my work turned into entertainment for anonymous viewers, and into raw material for photographers with no belief or foundation. To some ordinary people, it was, “I do not have the courage or money to be photographed by him, but it is interesting to watch. It is free.” To photographers pretending to be professionals or artists, it was, “What this guy says is annoying, but he is not wrong. His photos or words are worth copying.”
In any case, in a digital era where people no longer hand out flyers on the street, if social media is not being used to brag about meals or fashionable places, then for someone like me it becomes almost the entirety of my income. Especially because the photographs I take depend largely on recognition and trust.
Whether it was people carrying film cameras, dragging pretty subjects around to make pretty pictures while chanting about emotion, something even a child could do, or amateurs who paid people to undress and talked about decadent mini-nudes and bodies, along with the ignorant audiences fooled by them, even those who truly understand essence could see that my work was different. No matter whether it was called erotic, pornographic, sexual, or obscene, it was singular, perverse, and uncommon. It was something only I could do. There was demand. More precisely, there was potential demand.
That potential demand does not appear by standing still. It is closer to carving a solitary road on a path with no visible end, like a rock being worn down by years of storms. I had never seen anyone like myself, so my thinking could not have been entirely wrong. That is why a twisted history, verifiable records, and time had to accumulate and become widely known. That was recognition. No one acknowledges someone struggling alone in a small room.
I worked. A lot. With nothing, starting from the streets, I filled myself with what could be built even without money. One of those things was social media. After enduring for ten years, I had a studio, and people began to follow me. That is how recognition was built. It may have been shallow interest, close to a bubble, but even that was never easy for someone who came from the streets. Even bubble-like recognition requires trust. The traces and records I left behind were proof of that.
2. What Was Lost
I worked. I worked hard.
With nothing to my name, starting from the streets, I filled myself with what could still be built even without money. Social media was one of those things. After enduring for ten years, I finally had a studio, and people began to follow me. That is how I built recognition. It may have been shallow, close to a bubble, but even that was never easy for someone who came from the streets. Even bubble-like recognition requires trust. The traces I left behind, the records I accumulated, were proof of that trust.
I have lived my entire life trying to prove myself. I was noticed from a young age, and that naturally forced me into a position where I had to keep proving who I was. The harsh words I spoke, the even harsher sentences I wrote, every line of text where I criticized my own industry without shame, and the results that backed those words up. All of it became records. And over time, those records turned into trust. That is what people call recognition and credibility. For someone like me, who came up from the streets, that was the only way.
Then, recently, everything I had built over thirteen years disappeared in an instant. The original materials still exist to some extent. But even if that recognition was inflated, the scattered masses online, the potential clients, the people who called themselves fans and survived on shallow interest and scraps of attention, even those fragile fillers that barely held the space together, all vanished at once.
I had done well. I believe I had done well. Starting from the streets, over thirteen years, with innate sensitivity and uncommon experiences, I had built a certain level of recognition and earned a decent amount of money. At least in the shadows, I believed I was a kind of dark knight.
But the moment that single social media account disappeared, the one people treat as a hobby or a toy, I fell straight into the abyss. More precisely, my income vanished. Only then did the shallow fame and bubble-filled reality reveal themselves, leaving me so confused it felt like I was foaming at the mouth.
After that, I clenched my teeth twice more, pouring in money and time, desperately trying to recover thirteen years. But last December, the final account I had been clinging to was permanently deleted.
rabidstudio, rabidstudio_official, rabidstudio.official.
At the end of 2025, while I was in the United States trying to rest, even the last account disappeared. After that, any account created under the name “rabidstudio” was instantly and permanently removed. I tried countless variations in secret, but they were deactivated before I could even post anything. In short, I reached a point where I could no longer create anything under the name I had carried with pride. I have no idea when, or if, this restriction will be lifted. And as someone living day to day, I do not have the luxury of waiting.
What use would another name even be? For people who may not even realize I have disappeared, the only thread that could lead them back to me was that studio name. For over a decade, I poured money, time, and effort into turning that name into a brand. Even for those who could barely remember it properly, that name was still a one-percent thread, a piece of history.
People keep asking for reasons. The important thing is that neither the people asking nor I, who am expected to answer, actually know the reason. Most acquaintances offer guesses, presenting one direction or another as if they were solutions. But those are nothing more than speculative biases and foolish methodologies born from ordinary lives. This must be why, that must be why. I know they mean well, but that cheap comfort and shallow sympathy only drove me closer to madness. Suggestions like “try this” or “do it that way.” I do not want to measure the weight of the life I have lived against someone else’s life. Yet each time, I find myself comparing anyway. That, at least, feels unavoidable.
I was never ordinary. And because I was not ordinary, I had things others did not. Whether it was sensitivity or ability, the reason I reached this place without anyone’s help, starting from nothing, can only be one of two things: blind luck, or a different personality, direction, and method. I have never experienced blind luck, so this must be the result of what I built over many years. And now, that result remains as a case study of failure.
My longtime friends, acquaintances, even clients with shallow relationships. If I had not been myself, would they have ever had a reason or an opportunity to know me? Most of them became fans or clients because of my unique methods, my photographs, my writing, my direction, my sincerity, and my blunt, singular way of speaking. Step by step, in my own way, as myself, that is how I built who I was.
That is why the casual advice telling me to throw all of that away feels absurd. Of course, if survival were the only goal, there is nothing I would refuse to do. But I know better than anyone that recognition is not something you can build overnight. I am not ignorant of the one method that can create it instantly.
For example, in December 2024, when the rabidstudio account was deleted and I was completely lost, I needed to rebuild recognition quickly. I recruited a woman. Whether she was an aspiring model or an influencer did not matter. I needed someone I could produce, someone who could create a connection to my studio and my profession. I needed to pay rent the following month. If the person needed a justification to participate, I believed I could fabricate one if necessary.
In the end, because of my constant criticism and harsh direction, she could not even last six months, and it ended badly. That outcome was inevitable. From the start, the approach was too business-driven. Still, I proved what I had promised, three months earlier than expected. In just three months, the account reached 11,000 followers, with average views of 50,000 and a peak of 120,000. From start to finish, I manipulated everything like controlling an avatar. I knew how to build recognition quickly. That was never something I was ignorant of.
This has gone on longer than necessary, but regardless of my profession, within the limited world of social media there is one thing I am certain of. I know far more about this field than the average person. I have experienced things that people operating in conventional ways rarely encounter, and those experiences have accumulated. People who use social media just to show off, ordinary small business owners, consultants selling marketing advice, even those doing something similar to me without major issues yet. I believe I have more information and experience than even customer service staff who require a blue badge to speak to.
And the conclusion at the end of all that is simple. There is no answer. No one knows.
Until the last account disappeared in December 2025, I spent an enormous amount of time. Not just time, but hundreds spent on advertising, starving myself to try to recover lost traces and potential clients. And then it all vanished again, just as meaninglessly as before. Having gone through this not once or twice but three times, I became deeply exhausted.
After a glamorous twenties, a passionate thirties, entering my forties and facing repeated failures and defeats, I would find myself staring at a wall and suddenly breaking into tears. Back then, at least, I had someone I loved to lean on, colleagues, juniors, younger friends who followed me. That is probably why I was able to endure. But the person I loved left without looking back, and even those who once looked at me like an idol now stand above me, heads grown too large.
What is truly unbearable is this. When I was bigger, my words carried weight. Now that I have become small, those same words sound like flailing. If I had climbed higher during the brief moments when I had the chance, this failure might have become a foothold. Instead, left with ambiguous recognition and exposure only in the shadows, I was drained dry by people with no foundation and left behind as a nameless defeated soldier on an unnamed battlefield. Watching those with no backbone, no roots, no conviction step on my broken ankle and act as if it were always theirs, treating me as someone they have never heard of. That reality erodes the pride of someone who has spent a lifetime proving himself. It is hard to endure.
I never imagined that something as trivial as social media could destroy a life to this extent. Especially in a country that consumes social media more obsessively than anywhere else, a place where shallow knowledge is enough to posture endlessly, where people possessed by the fantasy of being experts flood the web. Being a Korean with this kind of profession, in Korea, made it impossible not to end up resenting the era and the country itself. To be honest, I never liked the temperament of Koreans to begin with.
It feels ridiculous, and deeply humiliating, to write such a grand piece about collapsing over something as small as social media. Still, there is a clear reason I wanted to leave this behind. In an age like this, I wanted time itself to eventually prove something. I wanted to release the resentment built up behind the question, “So who are you?” At the same time, it hurt too much to feel my own memory fading inside the words, “Who was that again?”
3. Light and Shadow
Looking back, I think the greatest fault lies with me. There were brief moments when I could have climbed a little higher, and I missed them. That is one of those facts that is difficult to deny.
Then again, perhaps it was not that I missed opportunities, but that I never allowed myself to settle, and so I failed to see the chances placed right in front of me. I needed time to stay still and refine myself, but the fear of falling behind was always stronger. Maybe behind the shameless words I used to say, “I’m the best,” “I’m a genius,” there was a buried anxiety, the knowledge that if I rested even for a moment, I would be swallowed up. I knew, even then, that I was someone constantly clinging to the edge, afraid of falling. Since my twenties, having developed a visceral hatred for poverty, I believed that the moment I settled was the moment I would be eliminated. So I kept chasing new attempts, one after another. In doing so, I let nearby opportunities slip away and invested myself obsessively in passion alone. In the end, this too was a business. From a distance, the right choices were obvious, but they were obscured by the label of “passion.” I was not making money. I was only burning myself.
For ten years, even while working successfully through street shoots and rented spaces without a single studio of my own, there was always a sense of bitterness lodged deep inside me. The fees I received, which never felt sufficient compared to my skill and never truly accumulated, always came back as the feeling that I was wasting my talent. Watching photographers who seemed to lack both sensitivity and ability work comfortably out of proper studios, pretending to be something grand, was unbearable. Why was it that I believed myself to be better than them, yet still had to wander the streets, barely scraping by, waiting for the moment I would have to put the camera down?
Clients, too, would approach me at first drawn only by the photos, but soon they would start asking questions. Where do you shoot? What kind of studio do you have, and how big is it? Is your camera crop sensor or full frame? What lights do you use? It felt fucking disgusting, and at the same time unbearably humiliating.
Then, in my ninth year, I pulled together money from everywhere and built an extravagant studio. I poured nearly ten years of pent-up resentment into that place. It was also when I first held a full-frame camera in my hands. In truth, I think I had an inferiority complex I never admitted. Even though my equipment was already more than sufficient by ordinary standards, I lusted after the gear carried by so-called successful professional photographers and ended up spending twenty million won just on new equipment.
I still cannot forget the day the studio construction was finished. I projected the photographs I had taken onto the white wall and sat there alone, watching them, until I cried. At the time, it felt overwhelming. I finally had a space to receive clients. I no longer had to schedule meetings at cafés. I no longer had to loiter outside, waiting for the client to arrive first because I could not afford coffee. Somehow, I had made it this far. Those thoughts came rushing in, one after another.
I thought I would no longer have to receive clients in a cramped one-room apartment, or photograph people against the backdrop of that same space. I would not have to hear awkward comments like, “Isn’t this just a studio apartment?” “You shoot here?” “This is where you sleep, right?” At last, I believed, I had the proper appearance of a professional photographer. With that belief, and in tears, I poured tens of millions more into that studio. And the end of that choice, which I thought had taken ten years to build, was simply the accumulation of more debt.
This story might sound like indulgence to photographers outside Korea, and to some it may not make sense at all. That is how deeply Korean society, including the roots of the photography industry, is consumed by pretense and vanity. In this country, a “studio” is not understood as an individual’s workspace, but as something closer to a photo shop that must exist in order to make money. I was the one who wanted to break that frame, yet before I knew it, I too had been consumed by that way of thinking.
In reality, there are countless photographers overseas who do not have fixed studios. Some work out of spaces no bigger than a closet. But in this country, swollen with vanity, every justification ultimately serves to satisfy the vanity of the audience. Creators are no exception.
Even as my debts piled up, I continued to make new investments. I believed that if my skill and ability held up, people would recognize it eventually. In truth, it was a genre that required more caution and sensitivity, yet I pushed forward relying solely on my confidence in my own ability. One of those attempts was overseas shooting. Traveling abroad with an ordinary client for two or three nights, sometimes four days, on a one-on-one tour, photographing them against foreign backdrops.
This was not something anyone could attempt unless they ran a large studio or had staff to support them. That made me think I had found something only I could do. But overseas shooting is not as simple as taking a few photos and coming back. It involves consideration for a stranger’s emotions in an unfamiliar place, conversation, creating an atmosphere that does not feel awkward, language barriers, styling and concepts, location scouting, local guides, accommodation, flight tickets, transportation schedules, and even safety concerns. It is a form of comprehensive planning that even close couples or friends would struggle with, attempted with someone you have just met, bound together by travel and photography.
The biggest desire driving this plan was my longing to work in the environments I had always admired in foreign photographers’ work, to escape the narrow, shabby backdrops of Korea. I wanted to get away from this stale air, these spaces, these emotions. I also knew very well that most people have no concept of investing personal passion into culture, art, or creation. Dealing with people whose only beliefs were designer bags that do not even show and driving luxury cars on tight salaries, the question was never why we should go abroad or what experience awaited there. It always came down to, “So how much is it?” That is why I left with the mindset of investing everything, expecting nothing to remain.
Believing that strong results would attract more interest, I initially priced the package at 1.2 million won, including flights, accommodation, and shooting for a three-night trip. Later it became 1.6 million, and eventually 2 million. Starting with Guam, then Tokyo, Fukuoka, Okinawa, Saipan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Boracay, Bohol, Thailand. Anywhere within four hours from Korea, I went, repeating cycles of investment and departure, focused solely on sustainable results and experiences. But overseas shoots are always exposed to unavoidable variables, and even at two million won, the actual profit was minimal. Now I have some experience and know-how and can calculate margins, but in the beginning it was truly overwhelming. Each unforeseen situation brought financial losses that felt heavier than the passion I had poured into it.
4. Exhausted
If I had to reduce my life to a single word, it would be endurance. Whatever I did, I stood out and drew attention, but rather than a clear sense of purpose, it was excessive passion that always led the way. On top of that came the risks of attempting things that had never been done before, and a family background that was never comfortable. Enduring itself became a form of challenge, and once I grew accustomed to enduring, I began living with the assumption that “somehow, things will work out.”
Looking back, despite the sheer range of experiences, the constant oppression, frustration, failures and defeats, urgency and despair, and deep resentment, I think I lived quite positively. I endured well. Like the title of a song I respect, Limit Break, there may have been a strange pleasure in constantly colliding with my limits and breaking through them.
But in the end, we are not beings who can defeat time. The strength to endure what keeps coming eventually runs out. No matter how many limits you have shattered, when you stand again before the same limits, you eventually grow tired of enduring.
Each phase of exhaustion grows heavier. The knees that once supported everything begin to ache slowly. I have stood back up many times, but the more I do, the more worn those joints become. On top of that, losing someone I loved a few years ago shattered much of my sense of responsibility and will. Every artist has a muse, something that sustains their vitality. If I had just one place to return to, one shoulder to lean on, one person to rely on, I might have found the strength to endure again even with broken knees. When I think about it that way, I sometimes wonder if I am an artist after all. After losing the person I loved, after losing my muse, neither my body nor my mind feels whole. Having lost that familiar sense of calm, I now find myself struggling alone, carrying everything by myself, and there are many moments when I feel deeply sorry for myself.
As always, there is much more I want to say. Even after writing something this long, it feels like I have not told even a tenth of what I wanted to. This is not a declaration about the future, nor is it a plea for shallow comfort or sympathy. It is closer to a record written to represent who I have been up to now. That is why the phrase “I am truly exhausted” may be the most accurate interpretation. Right now, there is simply nothing else I can do.
Of course, I am still struggling toward things that do not even exist yet, and I probably will continue to do so. That does not mean I am in unbearable pain or extreme suffering. It feels closer to being exhausted to the point of numbness, lingering in a zero state. This is how I have always lived, explaining myself, expressing myself, proving myself. The act of recording myself like this feels like proof that I managed to endure another day without completely collapsing.
I spent a little over a month in the United States and rested a lot. My mind never truly rested, but I did learn, at least a little, the concept of emptiness. If anything becomes even a small catalyst for growth, then no time is truly meaningless. Whether I achieve something or not, as long as I am not dying tomorrow, I am living each day calmly, accepting time as it comes, without needing it to be extraordinary.
Until now, I have had a strong aversion to the words “art” and “artist.” As I have said many times, my starting point was never noble. It came from something perverse, and I have never thought of what I do as art. Even now, compared to those I truly respect, I am nothing more than a crude worker, not even worthy of the dirt at their feet. You cannot define something so vague, nor can you become an artist simply because you want to be one.
Still, while staying in the United States, a shallow desire briefly surfaced, a wish to take my philosophy a little deeper. Plans I once had, like publishing a photo book or a book of writing, have all lost their momentum now. I do not know. At this moment, I am simply a little tired.
Lastly, I sincerely apologize for the delay in completing the work for those who have already been photographed, due to my extended break. Even if I were to quit altogether, I will take responsibility and finish everything. The work will continue, relentlessly. Please wait just a little longer.