Minor Visions: Korean Photography after the War

Abstract 

The ever-expanding “global” or “national” history of photography necessarily involves epistemologies of modernity framed through center-to-minor or minor-to-center dialogues. Instead of seeking a “good” minority history of modernity, Jung Joon Lee works through “minor” methods in her book Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press, 2024) to explore the practice of photography under normalized conditions of militarism. The book treats Korea’s transnational militarism as a lens to probe the officially and culturally sanctioned readings of images as we return to them over time. In this talk, Lee considers the visualization of spaces of transnational militarism—the U.S. military camptowns in South Korea—that are imagined spaces for most Koreans beyond South Korea’s sovereignty in the name of peacekeeping. Lee analyzes the gendered and racialized representations of Korean camptowns and their readings through the transoceanic history of racial capitalism, offering an analysis of Black worldmaking vis-à-vis transpacific experiences of de facto segregation and anti-Black racism both at home and in Korean camptowns, as presented in Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home and Yong Suk Kang’s 1982 photo series From Dongducheon. 

Bio 

Jung Joon Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theory and History of Art and Design at Rhode Island School of Design. Her research interests explore the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies, decoloniality, and gender and sexuality. Lee is currently working on a book project that examines photography and art exhibitions as spaces for transoceanic collaboration, kinship making, and repair. She was a Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University for 2022-23 and a visiting scholar at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Communication and Arts in 2022.