Abstract:
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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