Han Youngsoo: A Modern Eye in Postwar Korea
The booth that stayed with me most at this year’s Frieze was the one showing photographs by Han Youngsoo. What caught my eye first was how people dressed. Had Seoul really been this fashionable back then? Knitwear and trousers cut above the ankle. A small handbag and sandals. Coats and hats on people walking through the snow. There was style in their posture and the way they moved, too. These were people I would still notice on the street today, photographed in Seoul decades ago.
My image of Seoul in the 1950s and ’60s had been fairly narrow: the aftermath of war, poverty, people trying to rebuild their lives. Of course I knew that fashion existed, that people dressed up. But I had rarely imagined what that actually looked like. Han’s photographs made it vivid. Soon I was as curious about the person behind the camera as I was about the people in front of it. Part of what made their style so compelling was Han’s eye. Casual gestures and passing encounters came together in remarkably precise compositions. The appeal went well beyond the fascination of seeing how a city used to look. What surprised me most was that a photographer in Korea had been making pictures like these at that time.
Henri Cartier-Bresson came naturally to mind. People walking through a city, ordinary life unfolding, fleeting relationships between figures that would disappear a moment later. Photographs full of movement, yet exact in their composition. I felt something of that in Han’s work. The comparison has precedent. Introducing Han’s 2017 exhibition, the International Center of Photography drew parallels with Cartier-Bresson and other early Magnum photographers, pointing to his composition, timing and attention to social detail. I could see the appeal of calling him “Korea’s Henri Cartier-Bresson.” Here was a photographer whose work I wanted to discuss alongside the internationally celebrated names I already knew.
Born in Kaesong in 1933, Han served in the Korean War before returning to Seoul. In the late 1950s, he was active in Shinsunwhue, a group of realist photographers, documenting the streets, markets and people of the city after the war. In 1966, he established Han’s Photo Studio and went on to work in advertising and fashion photography. That history made me more curious about the sensibility I had noticed. How did his eye for people on the street connect with his eye for fashion? Perhaps their clothes had drawn me in because he had paid attention to those details in the first place.
Looking more closely, I also began to think of photographs I had recently seen in person at the Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography in Japan’s Tottori Prefecture. One of Han’s pictures shows children perched on boats propped upright, side by side. The long shapes repeat across the frame, while the children’s faces and bodies appear at different heights. Their loose, varied poses play against the orderly arrangement of the boats. The composition is precise, but there is mischief in it. This was what I had especially loved in Ueda’s work: ordinary people and objects brought into unexpected relationships, with a playfulness that makes you smile.
I felt a similar connection in a photograph taken on the sandy banks of the Han River. A woman carrying a parasol in the foreground, smaller figures behind her, generous space between them. Their positions seem so perfectly judged that a simple walk takes on the quality of a scene on a stage.
The street photographs had made me admire Han’s timing. These made me notice his pleasure in shape and space. Cartier-Bresson alone could not account for everything I was enjoying. Within Han’s attentive observation of everyday life, there was also a playful way of making the familiar look unexpected.
The longer I looked, the more I wanted to know about Han himself. His photographs had introduced me to a Seoul I had never imagined, but it was his eye that kept me looking. The style, the humour, the unexpected relationships between people and their surroundings: I wanted to see more of what he had noticed. Others could have walked the same streets and made entirely different pictures. The Seoul that appealed to me was a city seen through Han’s eyes.
The people in it began to feel closer, too. Choosing what to wear, meeting someone, working, taking a break. As their individual tastes and expressions came into focus, they became more than figures representing a period of history. I had never lived in their time, but the pleasure of looking at them was familiar. It was much like watching people on a street today.
Perhaps that is why Han’s booth stayed with me at Frieze. In a city whose past I thought I knew, I found faces I had never imagined, and a photographer who had noticed them long before I did. At first, I was surprised by the style of the Seoul he photographed. What stayed with me was Han Youngsoo.
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