Framing the Nation: Nation Building, Resistance, and Democratization in Korean Photography, 1945--2008
Item
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Title
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Framing the Nation: Nation Building, Resistance, and Democratization in Korean Photography, 1945--2008
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:d201fb3b4a7d:11330
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identifier
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11701
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Creator
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Lee, Jung Joon,
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Contributor
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Geoffrey Batchen
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art history | Asian studies | Art criticism | documentary photography | family portrait photographs | History of Photography | Korean art | Korean photography | Nation building
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines photography in Korea since 1945, focusing on the medium's relation to the processes of nation building, civic resistance, and democratization. The dissertation evaluates a number of types of photograph, ranging from war photographs to family portraits to art photography. These assessments are informed by the ways in which photography has articulated, and in turn been shaped by, social, political, and technological shifts in Korean society. Korea's history since 1945---a history of liberation, war, nation building, and civic struggle against authoritarian military governments---parallels the culture's development of photography and its various practices. The relationship between photography and nation building and photography and democratization is thus crucial to the history of both the nation and the medium: photography does not merely re-present Korean life; it is an integral part of it. The investigation is organized chronologically, following the progression of South Korea's social and political development and treating the distinct formative periods in the nation-building process as backdrop and cultivator for the photographic works that emerged from each era.;The history of photography in Korea since 1945 is the history of the struggles and trials of a society functioning under ideological conflict, state control, and a culture emerging from normalized militarism. This dissertation argues that the photographic practices that have developed since independence are fundamentally about the relationship between the state and the people. An understanding of this relationship, and how photography articulates it, is dependent on understanding the socio-political progress of the nation and how these photographic practices have become specifically Korean. The dissertation provides an understanding of this progress.;With the sharp increase in interest in "national photography" since the turn of the millennium, issues of subjectivity have become even more apparent. Embracing the importance of interdisciplinary methodologies, this dissertation emphasizes issues of subjectivity and power dynamics as part of the produced knowledge and contextualizes Korean photographic practices within the historical significance of nation building, civic resistance, and democratization.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Art History
