The Place of Women in Family Photography

Chapter 2 discusses family photographic portraits through a dual lens: photography’s ability to convey changing family narratives through portraiture and how family pictures embody the desire under the kukka to transform Korean society from colonial and war-ridden to modern and industrial. The chapter analyzes the changing styles of family photo portraiture and their entanglement with familial vis-à-vis state interests in the twentieth century, exposing how the photographic portraiture of family has embodied and mediated the patriarchal, developmentalist ideology of the Korean military regime. The subjects include an early twentieth-century family portrait; studio and snapshot family portraits; family portraits made by Korean women photographers; and portraits of ethnic minority families in and outside of Korea. Analyses of these photo-portraits reveal the ways that the place of women in family portraiture is constructed by patriarchy and is challenged, refused, and replaced by women as subjects, photographers, and viewers.