Throughout Han’s lifetime—he died in 1999—he was primarily identified for his industrial work. In 1966, he based Han’s Photograph, one of many first studios to concentrate on promoting (cosmetics, electronics) as South Korea’s client age was ushered in. He sometimes confirmed his artsier road pictures, and printed picks within the 1987 guide “Korean Lives” (삶). Within the introduction to that textual content, he wrote, “The attention of the digicam opened my very own eyes to the human scenario. . . . We’ve got grown together with the nation in an period of speedy modernization.” After his demise, his daughter Han Sunjung devoted herself to his archives, main a venture of sorting by way of hundreds of negatives and prints, attempting to make sense of what she describes as “the puzzle of Han’s fragmented memos, caught at angles on information of movie, picture captions and descriptions printed in catalogues.” Thus far, she has printed 4 books of his footage, organized thematically. Exhibitions have been mounted at museums in Korea, France, Hungary, and the U.S. I noticed a variety from the most recent guide, “When the Spring Wind Blows,” focussed on photographs of ladies, at a gallery present final yr in Manhattan.
Han practiced a style I would name summary vérité. There may be at all times the human kind on the one hand, and features and shapes on the opposite. In line with the artist Emile Rubino, Han usually stored a “constant bodily distance” from his topics; he labored at sufficient of a take away to permit issues to occur, in distinction to the closeup “dominant documentarian aesthetic of that interval.” With distance comes a lot scenic element—and motion. Contemplate the coiled suspense in what initially seems to be a stock-still portrait. The setting is a few type of curio store: there’s a glass-fronted cupboard, messily filled with random issues; the tile flooring is stained and cracked. A lady carrying a conventional two-piece hanbok costume—darkish jeogori prime; mild, flowery chima skirt—and with a Hollywood-style delicate bob sits in a steel chair, studying a broadsheet. However she isn’t simply sitting. She folds herself so acutely that her face is hardly seen. She pours all her focus into the newspaper. Her posture of absorption is additional intensified by the outward splaying of her toes, wrapped in elf-toed beoseon booties.
Myeongdong, Seoul, undated (1956-1963).
The formal composition at work in that portrait is much more evident in Han’s aerial landscapes, shot from bridges and promontories. In a single, 5 ladies in white hanbok, carrying bundles of white laundry on their heads, kind a decent, diagonal spiral (in response to gusts of wind?) towards darkish fields of grass and cropland. In one other, overlooking a Han River marina, there are three interlocking layers: water (many of the image), hilly horizon, and, at left, a scalloped fringe of rowboats and storage sheds that pulls your eyes downward. A small determine of a person in swimming briefs, seen from behind, stretches his arms right into a “T.” He’s nearly to dive off a rickety river barge, however, for this second, his white physique resembles a decorative cross.
