Post Trauma: Re-imagining Korean Political History with Photography

Abstract

This paper analyzes how contemporary Korean photographers reconstruct the turbulent political history of Korea. How can photography narrate historical events that have ended or could not be witnessed? If photographers re-interpret existing history, what is their reason, and what facilitated them? How is their use of the medium different from previous generations? This research addresses various ways that contemporary photographers utilize the medium to affect the way people remember and narrate history. Despite their disparate subject matters and styles, what unites them is that their creative re-interpretation of the country’s key postwar moments is at the core of work. They abandoned an iconic function that photographic representation of atrocity is believed to have. Avoiding a symbolic image that stands for the whole, they demonstrate that much can remain oblique, hidden, or even twist commonly held assumptions. Evidential power that anchors the medium to reality is adjusted by photographers’ aesthetic interpretations to engage the viewer’s imagination. While nothing iconic or spectacular is presented, heroic mythicization is absent as well. Furthermore, they involve the history of photography and critically examine the way of representing historical events with photographic medium. In the history of Korean photography, its huge transition reflects the country’s transformation into a cosmopolitan identity in the late 1980s. Demonstrating the cultural expansion, they not only gained knowledge of global photography, but also applied it to their own work.. By examining their works, this paper proposes a new frame for understanding history as construction, as well as another way to understand contemporary Korean photography.