MJ Kim has been documenting Paul McCartney since 2008, following the legendary ex-Beatle around the globe as he entertains millions of fans through the common language of music.
Kim started his circuitous route toward photography in 1995 at the London College of Communications (formerly known as the London College of Printing and Distributive Trades) in London, England. Having held some entry-level film jobs in his native South Korea, Kim began his formal education by studying filmmaking before still photography took his interest. “The more I took pictures, the more I fell in love with still photography,” he says.
There, during the last years of the film era, Kim learned lessons that continue to serve him. “When you shoot film, it’s money,” he says. “You have to buy film, paper, and so on. Every shot is important. I love the technology of the digital revolution, but everything is so easy, perhaps too easy, and produces too many images.” This contrast of technologies is in part responsible for his exploration into alternative methods throughout his career. Kim has used the 19th-century wet plate collodion process to make celebrity portraits, for example, and worked with Polaroids exposed through his 8x10 Kodak Eastman 2D view camera for several series, including one documenting master metal craftsmen working in Seoul.
When economic realities caused Kim to put schooling on hold, he found practical education through a series of jobs in London that gave him experience in news, including for The Daily Telegraph and the Press Association. When he landed a job with Getty Images as a senior entertainment photographer in 2004, the experience was career changing. Assignments included coverage of international events including the Cannes, Venice, and Berlin film festivals as well as movie junkets that put him in contact with public relations people and celebrity agents that would soon pay massive dividends.
His first freelance assignment after leaving Getty in 2007 was to photograph the Spice Girls for four months on their reunion tour. Their publicist, Stuart Bell, was also Paul McCartney’s publicist. After the tour, Bell asked McCartney to look at Kim’s work, which McCartney liked. They’ve been collaborating ever since.
BEST DECISION
In 2008, having recently started working with McCartney, Kim returned to school during his off time to earn a Master of Arts degree in fashion photography from the London College of Fashion. “I knew how to do live action shoots because I was a news photographer,” he explains. “On stage, musicians produce amazing energy that only comes out on stage. During the live performance, you can capture that energy as a photojournalist, but you don’t have any control. In the studio, however, you can influence the image by lighting and directing the subject. I wanted to create my own images, but I didn’t know how. So, I decided to go back to school and learn. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
“I think you can learn technique, such as studio lighting, fairly quickly, but the more important thing to learn is the understanding of what’s behind the images, why you think this image is beautiful, why you want to create these kinds of images. I had a lot of whys, question marks in my head. That’s why I decided to go back to school.”
His studies took him beyond technique into the history of photography, painting, and architecture as well as visual inspirations. For his final project, Kim asked McCartney’s daughter Stella if he could use some of her dresses for a fashion series. “The concept was that the girl was laying down wearing a white plain gown representing her death. But when she’s resurrected, she’s wearing Stella’s dress and has full makeup and hair. She’s resurrected with a fashion soul.”
BEYOND THE STILL IMAGE
The desire to go beyond documenting celebrities has led Kim to pursue personal projects, including film directing. He asked himself the question, When can I bring my own art piece into the world? And he found the answer in his roots: film directing.
But it was a chance encounter that would reignite this latent desire to tell stories through moving pictures. In 2019, Kim met an Australian movie producer who had seen Kim’s photo exhibit in Singapore. They became friends, and Kim was then introduced to a writer, who took up a film synopsis Kim had written and turned it into a script for a short film. To make a long and winding story short, says Kim, “We got the cast and crew together, filmed the short ‘Juicy Girl’ in Korea, and won something like 30 awards.” With the success of the short it was time to focus on a full-length film. The feature has the same basic story line as the short, and production is slated to begin this year.
BACK ON THE ROAD
After two years off from touring because of the COVID-19 pandemic, McCartney returned to the big stage in 2022. “The shows have been as amazing as ever,” says Kim, who remains awed by McCartney’s energy and talent. “He was born in 1942 and is doing three-hour shows.”
Kim’s favorite McCartney song is “I Saw Her Standing There” because of its classic rock ‘n’ roll rhythm as well the story it tells, which reminds him of his youth in Korea. The song was released two decades before Kim was born and half a world away. The music and lyrics transcend both the years and international borders.
“It is quite amazing to see 50,000 multi-generation people, I mean from three years to 100 years old, enjoying the same music together,” Kim says. It is such a pleasure to witness and to capture the love and harmony.”
Mark Edward Harris is an award-winning photographer and writer based in Los Angeles.
