The city is in constant change. Like a living organism, it grows and declines, carrying traces of the people living within it. The 2025 DAEJEON PHOTO thematic exhibition, Cities and Humans, records urban landscapes worldwide and highlights the human stories inside. Though these stories come from different times and places, they leave us with the same question:
“What memories are we building in these spaces?”

In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo describes cities scattered in an unseen order—cities glowing with gold, endlessly expanding, existing only in memory, and constantly crumbling and rebuilding. Though different in appearance, these cities share an invisible connection.

The urban landscapes in this exhibition are similar. Captured in different times and places, the images seem disconnected but connect through shared sensations and memories. Cities and Humans invites us to find the links in these fragmented urban stories.

Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space explains that urban space is not just physical but a dynamic process shaped by social relationships and human life. A city is more than buildings; its meaning forms in the memories and experiences of its people. Cities are created, destroyed, and recreated continuously, and through these changes, life and memory go on.

Though the photos depict fragmented spaces, they connect shared stories across different landscapes. These cities exist at different times and places, but their traces of life meet again in our shared memories.

Photography, with its power to store and interpret memory, becomes a passage reflecting past, present, and future.

We hope this exhibition offers a new way to feel and think about the relationship between cities and humans.