‘Picturing a Moment’: The Colonial Visions of Newspaper Photography in Early Twentieth-century Korea

Abstract

This article explores the early introduction of photographic images to the daily newspaper in Korea in the second decade of the twentieth century. The technology of mass printing photographic images was pioneered by the Government General’s Korean-language newspaper, Maeil sinbo, in the years immediately after Japan’s colonial occupation began. The encounter between the two technologies of photography and printing thus developed within the broader context of colonial governmentality and the simultaneous emergence of modern structures of the archive and the individual. Exploration of the first published snapshot series offers a case study of the entanglement of modern technologies in the social relations of early photographic images. Reading the snapshot series today reveals the contours of a politics and aesthetics of colonial visuality, which was to long outlive the only apparently trivial series.