근대기 국왕 초상의 이미지 내러티브 형성-스미스소니언 앨리스 루즈벨트 컬렉션, 고종 초상사진을 중심으로

Abstract

This study investigated the image-narratives of king Gojong's photograph in 1905, which is now in the Alice Roosevelt Collection, Freer and Sackler Archives of Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. In the modern era when the political and diplomatic rivalry between the countries has been accelerated by the civilization standards, the image-narratives of the Gojong's portrait also produced and delivered to the American’s media darling, Alice Roosevelt Longworth who is daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the U.S. as the diplomatic gift. In 1905, Alice Roosevelt visited Korea as part of her diplomatic trip to Asia. The photographs of king Gojong and the crown prince were left with the text of Alice Roosevelt's memoir. The more empirical discussion on the formation of image-narratives of the portrait of king Gojong used for diplomatic purposes is possible based on such related materials. This discussion makes it possible for the images made for diplomatic purpose to be converged into the cultural and political context of the Korean turbulent modern period, so that the king's photograph can be interpreted as forming the meaningful image-narratives. By comparing and analyzing the images of political leaders of China and Japan sent to Alice Roosevelt at a similar time, the diplomatic portrait of the Gojong was converged in the cultural and political context, as well. In addition, utilizing the concept of ‘ekphrasis’ which approaches the gap between ‘seeing’ and ‘saying’ interchangeably, we can find out the multi-layered meaning process between the visual image and its related texts in museum archives. The image-narratives, which was newly constructed in the modern period was also examined. Ekphrasis presents a core notion of redrawing of the images in narratives, and important concept that transforms the visuals into the special meanings for the audience by forming the image-narratives. Ekphrasis is located between text and image, crossing two medias and conveying special meanings to viewers about historically represented images during the Korean modern period. Modernized images such as photographs represent various semantic elements of society, including not only the level of visual record but also the transcendental textuality. Especially, as the record of the historical figures, the portrait photographs express the more socio-political semantics and the textuality through the representing images. In addition, we attempted a multi-layered discussion on the possibility of visual images representing the national narratives and symbols and interpreted them as a kind of symbolic elements different from traditional meanings.