By Conor Risch

To create his "ON-AIR: EIGHTHOURS" series of landscapes, Korean photographer Atta Kim used eight-hour exposures to turn places like Times Square and the Champs Elysées stark and desolate. In his large-format photographs, the upper portions of the images are often static skylines, while at the street level the movement of vehicles and pedestrians through the frames leave streaks of light and other evidence of motion, which in many of the photographs appears like a mist hanging over the pavement.

To create the images, Kim traveled to Berlin, Prague, Paris, New York, China and India, using an 8 x 10 camera to record scenes on slide film. "The scenes were large-scale live theaters without rehearsals," he says. Although he encountered many "incidents" during his lengthy exposures, he says the unknown variables "were a great pleasure for my project."

Kim chose eight hours as the length of his exposures in reference to the approximate amount of time in a day a photographer can utilize natural light, and also with a nod toward Nicéphore Niépce's all-day camera obscura exposures, which he made in the 1820s. But whereas Niépce used lengthy exposures to better capture and record the subject, Kim's eight-hour exposures reveal, by allowing parts of his image to vanish, that which we can't see with the naked eye—the ephemeral nature of human existence and its underlying energy. As Aperture publisher Lesley Martin notes in her essay in Kim's new book, due out this month from German publisher Hatje Cantz, Kim's images show us an "ineffably palpable sense of humanity become pure energy and light."

Kim has long professed an interest in Zen philosophy, and the Zen concept of deconstruction is central to this work. "Deconstruction in Eastern philosophy is believed to be the process for finding some world which is not shown," says Kim. "This is called Zen." His lengthy exposures also hint at the meditative process central to Zen practice.

Although it might be tempting to read Kim's photographs, from which humanity in any recognizable form has vanished, as foreshadowing a post-human world, he insists that the feeling of desolation was not intended to be negative. "No one knows what future the evolution of humans will make," says Kim. "If there will be a post-human [world], you are post-human. Your DNA contains all the information from the origin to the present of humankind." Kim is interested in showing that the past and future of humanity are all contained in the present, that everything and everyone are interrelated.