The Gyeonggi Center for Photography (GCP) is a public institution in Gyeonggi Province dedicated to photography, where exhibitions, education, creative production, research, regional archiving, and international exchange take place based on photography as one of the central visual languages of our time.
The center values not only professional expertise but also the participation and experiences of ordinary people. It was established as a platform that explores and fosters a deeper understanding of human life, the environment, and living beings through photography.
As photography enters a new turning point with the emergence of artificial intelligence, GCP seeks to explore photography as a key language of contemporary visual culture while expanding it as a public cultural resource that anyone—including the citizens of Gyeonggi Province—can encounter and participate in as part of everyday life.
As a place where anyone can become a co-creator, GCP functions as an open platform where photographers, researchers, curators, and citizens from Korea and abroad naturally intersect. Moving beyond the role of a conventional exhibition space, the center aims to become a hub for photographic culture where communities connect through photography—inside and outside the center, as well as online—while experimental creation, production, research, and discourse develop together.
GCP envisions an open cultural forum where people from diverse cultural and social backgrounds gather to reflect, share experiences, and discover new perspectives on life. At the same time, the center aims to grow together with local communities as a public cultural platform that expands the cultural diversity and creative ecosystem of Gyeonggi Province.
With the idea of "a place where all living beings connect through photography," the Gyeonggi Center for Photography aspires to become a public cultural platform that connects regions, generations, and the wider world through photography experienced with the body and the senses.
The inaugural special long-term exhibition Familia: Family and Family Photographs approaches family photography as both the most private form of record and a universal image that reveals the social structures and relationships of a particular era. Within recurring compositions and similar scenes, the exhibition discovers the differences created by the lives, generations, and memories of different families, while tracing how the personal time contained in photographs expands into the collective face of society. Bringing together works by artists who, since the 2000s to the present, have interpreted and documented the forms of family and everyday life in Korea within the contexts of contemporary art and documentary photography, the exhibition also includes performative photographic works based on contingency. Together, these works illuminate the moment when private memories accumulate into a shared record. The exhibition further presents diverse perspectives by artists who have sensitively observed the changing social realities of family life, including the emergence of single-person households and families formed around companion animals, reflecting broader shifts in the meaning of family and the form of family photographs.
As one of the core curatorial projects that most clearly expresses the identity of the Gyeonggi Center for Photography, the exhibition examines the evolving concept of family and the contemporary phenomena surrounding the image of family. A participatory family-photography performance will take place at the exhibition opening, and during the exhibition period visitors from Gyeonggi Province will also be invited to take part in programs based on their own family albums. Through the repetition and differences found within ordinary family photographs—records of private memory—the exhibition invites viewers to reflect on how individual memories expand into collective records, and how these images together form the visual landscape of an era.
