For anyone in New York, the Korea Society is hosting an exhibition of early realist South Korean photography entitled Traces of Life: Seen Through Korean Eyes 1945-1992. The photographs are on loan from one of the first public photography museums in Korea, Dong-Gang Museum of Photography, and from several of the photographers (or their estates) who developed the relatively new art form in Korea in the postwar period. The entire collection is black-and-white, and is supported by a catalogue edited by the curator Chang Jae Lee with an introduction by David R. McCann, the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature at Harvard University. These pioneers set the stage for the new generation of Korean photographers (for example from a recent exhibition in Paris) who—like their European counterparts--have taken a much more exuberant modernist and post-modernist turn.
The exhibit opens September 19 and runs through December 7.
