Listening to Camptown Photographs

Chapter 6 teases out how to begin to explore affective possibilities beyond looking at and identifying the subject of camptowns via photographic representations. This chapter examines the ways in which camptown images have helped viewers outside of camptowns suspend their anxiety about the place, laden with foreign desire and currency. Photographic works on camptowns diverging from this perspective include the Korean photographer Yong Suk Kang’s 1980s images of camptowns through snapshot portraits and siren eun young jung’s multimedia work in the city of Dongducheon, which does away with the representation of bodies and faces in favor of spaces and voices. Exploring jung’s camptown images provides ways in which the viewer can interrogate and resist the ethnonationalist symbolization of camptowns and camptown women as a binary of promiscuous traitors and victims of the American empire.