What constitutes Korean photography? How do photographs of and in Korea shape national identity? Or perhaps more accurately, how are photography and the nation mutually constituted? And how might Korean photography intervene in the history of photography itself? The historiography of Korean photography brings forth a set of methodological issues that continue to shape the field of Korean art history at large. Demanding the construction of “Koreanness” in which a photograph must demonstrate its unique national and cultural authenticity, Korean photography is compartmentalized and perceived as a peripheral modernity that serves or catches up to Euro-American modernity. Two recent works on Korean photography, Jeehey Kim’s Photography and Korea and Jung Joon Lee’s Shooting for Change: Korean Photography After the War, grapple with these complex issues of Korean photography and offer two exemplary yet distinct methodological frames to critically engage with the relationship between photography and nation in the global history of art.

As “the first comprehensive Western language overview of photography in and around Korea,” Kim’s Photography and Korea covers a wide range of geographies, from North Korea to Korean diasporas, and periods, from the nineteenth century to the present (9). The expansive temporal and geographical breadth of the book not only makes an invaluable contribution to the understudied field of Korean photography, but its breadth also reinforces its core argument. As Kim states, “Going beyond nationalist histography, [it] eschews presenting Korea as a single entity, recognizing that Korea, and Asia broadly, has never been a closed space, but rather one that has been entangled in the dynamics of global socio-politics” (7). Rather than solidifying the notion of nation, Kim pays close attention to the ways in which the peninsula has been visualized and imagined through photography. The range of genres and practices, along with the sheer number of photographers she considers is exhaustive, leading to a portrayal of the nation as always unfixed and uncontained yet firmly implicated in global politics. Kim’s tight focus on the shifting views of Korea, or multiple Koreas, is further supported by her comprehensive research on exhibitions, archives, and journals on Korean photography, which is organized and generously shared in the appendix. The author’s impressive archival research demonstrates the dynamic entanglements in the history of Korean photography, illustrating that it has always been central, not peripheral, to the global history of photography.

The six chapters are organized chronologically, moving from the early semantic conceptualization of photography in the 1860s to contemporary photography of Korean diasporas. The book’s organization through chronology is charged with the fraught politics of colonialism and imperialism in Korean history, as Kim shows how photography navigated and mediated these contentious milieus. Chapter one lays a foundation for Kim’s overarching argument. In discussing the nineteenth-century emergence of photography studios in Korea, Kim analyzes how photography, a medium understood as a civilizational tool, was entangled in the domestic and international politics of modernization. She writes of three major photography studios: “Like [Yong-Won] Kim and [Un-Yeong] Ji, [Cheol] Hwang’s experiments with the new technology as a way to modernize his country were interrupted by domestic conflicts over modernization and the Japanese intervention to support reformists. Photography was not merely a new technology; as a cultural phenomenon, it was integrally involved in historical and political turmoil, as were its Korean pioneers” (23). Kim further develops her argument by examining how landscapes and royal family portraits in the early twentieth century were produced and circulated during Japanese advancement into the peninsula.

Chapter two covers the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945) by examining colonial visualizations of Korea, with a particular emphasis on women’s bodies. Chapter three looks at the critical period of the 1940s when Korea began to be divided into north and south. Kim’s analysis of the lingering traces of the colonial style in postcolonial Korean photography is particularly compelling, as it complicates the condition of postcoloniality in Korea. Chapter four presents lesser-known photographs of the Korean War, including an African American soldier’s Korean War photograph album, as well as postwar visualization of the war’s impact in the 1960s exemplified by works by Japanese and Korean photographers such as Shisei Kuwabara, Nagisa Oshima, and Myung-Duk Joo. The final two chapters follow the established chronology of Korean history, with chapter five on post-1970s photography and chapter six on contemporary photographic works by diasporic communities, reflecting South Korea’s turn towards Segyehwa (globalization) in the 1990s. It is also noteworthy that the last chapter features photographs of various diasporic communities in Korea such as refugees from Ethiopia and Japanese women residing in Korea—marginalized groups that are often overlooked in the Korean diaspora scholarship.

Throughout the chapters, Kim offers a range of incisive critiques to illuminate the different legacies of colonialism in Korea. She examines photographers’ emphasis on subjects that reiterate the colonial gaze, from local color, rural landscapes, folk customs, to shamanism; discusses similarities between photography in prewar Manchukuo and postwar socialist North Korea; and underscores colonial structures of institutionalizing art during the “postcolonial” 1960s. Many scholars in the field of Korean studies, such as Chungmoo Choi and Sang Mi Park, have problematized the conditions of postcoloniality in South Korea, calling attention to the ways in which South Korea’s cultural and political policies are complicated by the legacies of colonialism. Kim’s examination of colonial legacy in postcolonial Korean photography makes an invaluable contribution to the existing field. Photography and Korea—rich in illustration, extensive in research, and comprehensive in content—is a tremendous resource for a wide range of groups including researchers, educators, and students alike.

If Photography and Korea is intended to be an overview of the long history of photography in and around Korea from the 1800s to the present, Lee’s Shooting for Change offers a focused study on postwar South Korean photography. While Kim’s broad scope highlights the shifting geographical boundaries of Korea to re/deconstruct the terms of national photography, Lee’s work employs a temporal critique as an onto-epistemological investigation of photography to unsettle the “nation” in national photography. Across six chapters, thematically organized into three sections, Lee weaves together a wide range of photographic genres and practices, including vernacular, documentary, art, and archival photography. Each chapter illustrates a different facet of the relationship between photography and militarism, conveying the omnipresent pervasiveness of transnational militarism in South Korea.

The author’s attention to the images of children and women is exceptionally remarkable—another thread that implicitly and explicitly connects many chapters in the book. As the first section establishes, portrayals of family narratives mediate and are mediated by the construction of nation-state and collective memory in postwar South Korea. In particular, Lee investigates the establishment of a national developmentalist narrative through the rhetoric of nuclear family with an emphasis on children, signifying a tripartite national relationship of what she calls family-minjok-nation. The author explains that the triadic relationship, comprised of the family, minjok (ethno-national subjects of Korea), and nation, refers to prevailing ideology in Korean postwar cultural production, in which reconstructing the family becomes an allegory for the transformation of the Korea nation vis-à-vis the minjok, people of the same ancestry representing the nation. Indeed, Lee begins the book with a chapter on Korean War-era photographs of war orphans, considers the role of women and children in family portraits in chapter two, then moves on to discuss the Saenghwaljuŭi Realists’ focus on familial relationships as a response to military government censorship in chapter three. She also considers the image of a child in a YouTube video made to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of 6.25, the start of the Korean War, before concluding with an examination of women in camp towns in the last chapter.

The first chapter builds the foundation for her critique of gendered historicization of photographs of children and women in South Korea. She probes how remembering the Korean War through orphan imagery vis-à-vis victim nationalism not only reaffirms the binary of the US-as-savior and Korea-as-orphan (Cold War Orientalism), but it also functions to conceal the South Korean state’s complicity. Lee writes, “The orphan image leaps the time of the regime, of brutal oppression and collective self-sacrifice for the sake of the family-minjok-nation, and arrives at the present moment of remembering” (43). In other words, the dynamics of Cold War Orientalism that infantilize and gender postwar South Korea through orphan imagery serve the South Korean state as “the Korean ethno-nationalist-masculinist rationalization for postwar remasculinization” (46). The second chapter on women and family photography is particularly notable in its reading of seemingly innocuous family photo-portraits in the context of the Korea military regime’s patriarchal, developmentalist ideology. Tracing the history of family photo portraits since the early twentieth century, Lee offers a compelling analysis of how photographic family portraits, as a visual embodiment of national transformation, relay national pressure to modernize through a rigid structure of hierarchical and gendered nuclear family unit in the military state.

The second part focuses on iconic photographs of public protest in postwar South Korea—namely the 4.19 Revolution of 1960, the 1987 June Uprising, and the 2008 candlelight protest. Protest photography is treated as a medium of multitemporality and plural performativity that continuously reproduces, negotiates, and ignites new political imaginaries and subjectivities. While Lee addresses the images of children in Saenghwaljuŭi photographs in chapter three, I would have appreciated her sharp analysis on the images of women and children extended to protest images, as many iconic photographs of public protests for democratization predominantly depict young male students, while by contrast photographs of the Korean War and camp towns lack Korean men, a point that she does acknowledge. Furthermore, many protests are memorialized through an image of mourning family members, particularly a mother who lost a son or a child who lost a father, after the event. What does it mean to remember a protest through a photograph of a grieving mother or child? Nonetheless, Lee’s critique of gendered historicization of photography critically reveals the complex relationship between photography and militarism in postwar South Korea, and it is sure to enrich readers who are in the field of art history, as well as Korean studies, Asian American studies, and gender studies.

Lee’s conceptual framing of photography as a multitemporal and multisensorial medium lends itself to the author’s rigorously attentive reexamination of each photograph under discussion, firmly grounding it in historical and cultural contexts. For example, she encourages the reader to feel “the scathing sounds of the aerial bombing and the thundering silence” in Yong Suk Kang’s black-and-white photographic landscape to engage with the quotidian conditions of militarism and imperialism (157). Or she asks the reader to consider the multispatiality of transnational adoption in Agnès Dherbey’s photographs of her adoptive and biological family and to radically reimagine the photographic subjects in orphanhood “to let them break free and grow old, as everything outside the boxes has: as human beings, as people” (36). Lee’s meticulous examination of each photograph yields a powerfully discerning and radical reevaluation of all parties involved in the photography (the photographer, the photographed, and the photograph itself)—an admirable feat that all scholars hope to achieve.

Rich in research, Lee’s book considers photography as a multitemporal event and multisensorial encounter to investigate “an onto-epistemology of Korean photography’s history in the making” (19). By attending to photography’s multiple events, she argues that seizing their temporal disjunctions, or what Lisa Yoneyama calls “catachrony” or “temporal discombobulation,” offers the possibility to unlearn and unsettle the way we believe we know history. Her critique of photography’s temporality is interconnected with the sensorial effect of the medium: “The universalizing appeal of modern temporality silences the foreign sound of the photograph . . . To attend to the multisensoriality of photography is to reconsider its onto-epistemology and intersectionality” (12).

Her thoughtful analysis further claims a larger stake in the history of photography. Through her investigation of the photography’s multitemporality and multisensoriality, Lee demonstrates a new framework that discursively redefines national photography. Her methodology elaborates on the work of critical race studies, gender studies, and/or postcolonial studies scholars, such as Rey Chow, Lisa Lowe, Jasbir Puar, Kandice Chuh, and Homi Bhabha, to name a few. Through her critical engagement with previous literature, she frames national photography as an anticolonial project that challenges the homogenizing temporality of modernity, thus effectively making an epistemological intervention in the history of photography and knowledge production.

While drastically different in methodologies and foci, the two books offer a much-needed nuanced exploration of Korean photography. Kim’s work may ground the reader who hopes to learn about the comprehensive history of Korean photography, and Lee’s work offers a focused scholarly analysis on postwar South Korean photography. Read together, both books elucidate that Korea in Korean photography is always relational, whether temporally or geographically. The two indispensable works attune the reader to the intricate politics of national photography and art history at large.