[KS] Question on colonial photography

[Michael Pettid]

Dear Hyung Il,

I have stumbled upon similar commentary of women with
exposed breasts in various ChosOn period literary
works although the particulars escape me at present. 
I think reference to this can also be found in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century travel
records of Westerners to Korea.  Also, accounts of
women wearing the shorter chOgori exposing their
breasts seems to indicate that this was done to
demonstrate that they had given birth to a son, and
thus was a marker of status in some ways.  I suspect
that this was a practice confined to women of lower
status groups.

Hope this is of help,

Michael Pettid

--- Pai hyungil <hyungpai at yahoo.co.jp> wrote:

> Dear members,
> In my recent research on photography in the early
> colonial
> era, I have come across quite a few images of Korean
> women, such as haenyo (diving women) and country
> women
> with exposed breasts. Torii Ryuzo took such
> photographs in
> the 1910's and they were included in the history of
> Korean
> photographic albums in the 1990's. Today, I also
> found an
> illustrated journal dating to 1911, of a Korean
> market
> scene in full color with a main figure of a woman
> walking
> down the road carrying a water jar with exposed
> breasts. 
> A while back when I showed these photographs to my
> aunties
> in their 90's (who were kids in the Taisho era),
> they
> denied that they ever saw such women walk around
> like
> that. Of course, they were raised as urban educated
> yangban women so they may have missed something.
> Was this part of the male photographers' fascination
> with
> the exotic/erotic female ? I know there are many
> such
> photographs over the decades in National Geographic
> and
> probably the aesthetic goes back to Gauguin and
> beyond.
> However, in Korea's case, is this state of undress
> such
> village life (the cropped top is so short, they hang
> out
> accidently), or wet nurses advertising their
> services? Are
> their missionary accounts of women's clothing in the
> nineteenth century? And if it was wide-spread, did
> the
> custom die down with the Westernization and
> Christianization? 
> 
> Hyung Il Pai
> Japan Foundation Fellow
> National Research Institute of Cultural Properties,
> Tokyo
> 
> 
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