강연초록:
This
paper analyzes the aesthetics, visual and cultural legacies of early travel
photography taken by the first generation of globetrotters,
anthropologists/archaeologists and commercial photographers who arrived in
Korea armed with a camera at the turn of the last century. Even a century
later, 19th century photographs taken by Westerners such as Felice Beato,
Percival Lowell, George Rose, and Mukarami Tenshin, a successful commercial
photo-studio based in Keijo continue to adorn exhibitions and art galleries
organized by National Fine Arts/ Yi Royal Family Museum, Seoul Museum of
History, and Folk Museums devoted to Yi dynastic (1392-1910) arts/crafts as
well as Modern Art exhibitions in the Republic of Korea. Today’s museum
curators have also staged retrospective exhibitions re-cycling century old
stereo-card views, postcards, photo-albums, and digitized photographs tracing
the history of leisure travel to scenic destinations not only in Korea but
throughout the former territories of the Japanese empire. Since the advent of
Hallyu (Kanryu) or the Korean Wave marked by the spread of popular media
products such as trendy modern dramas, epic historical romances and K-pop idols
throughout Asia, the trade in old media has also experienced a booming business
on the internet with record auction prices posted by on-line stores such as
ebay to old book stores specializing in antique photo-albums, and travel
ephemera. A new generation of buyers, sellers, and consumers alike are all
vying with curators in order to collect nostalgic tableaus of a long lost
“Hermit Kingdom,” populated by street urchins, dancing girls (kisaeng), and the
fallen Yangban gentry posed amidst rustic ruins. When mass produced postcard
views of Korea debuted in the 1900s, they were made and sold as tourist
souvenirs by Japanese commercial photo-studios who had set up shop in the newly
opened ports and cities in order to cater them sailors, soldiers, students,
merchants and Japanese settlers. By the 1910s, following the annexation of
Korea, the “picturesque” conventions and framing of “Native Types and Famous
Places” adopted by early travel photographers were appropriated by powerful
colonial/national institutions and empire building corporations such as
exposition committees, the Colonial Government General Office of Korea Museum
and Education Departments including the Chosen Railways, the South Manchuria
Railways Co., the Japan Tourist Bureau, retail merchants, and publishers, who
purchased the original glass plates and reformatted them for advertising,
marketing and political propaganda purposes. The contextualization of the
historical, ethnographic, and visual knowledge contained in this body of early
travel archives is significant because these turn of the century images
portraying the sublime beauty and sadness of Korea's decaying millennia old
Buddhist temples, tombs, palaces, and pagodas framing seductive courtesans,
palace ladies, shamans, and deposed royals were pivotal in transforming the
tourist image of Korea as the most authentic, antiquated, and “time-less”
destination in the Japanese empire.
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