Han Youngsoo

Seoul after the war lay in ruins. Yet the Seoul in Han Youngsoo's camera looks different from the postwar devastation we usually picture.

In 1953, Han Youngsoo came home from combat on the front line. The city the twenty-year-old faced was a heap of ashes. But the Seoul in his camera wears a different expression. Women crossing a bridge, children skating on ice, people standing at a shop window. Han looked less at what had fallen than at what was standing back up.

A City Standing Back Up

Han Youngsoo was born in Kaesong in 1933. He grew up in a well-off family and was close to drawing and photography from an early age. Back in Seoul after the war, he took up the camera in earnest, and in 1958 he joined Sinseonhoe, a realist photography group. Its members set out to record society honestly.

The years he focused on were 1956 to 1963. Cheonggyecheon and Myeong-dong, the Han River, streets where streetcars still ran. Most of the time he went out and photographed a city in the middle of change. The people in front of his camera were poor, but they are never pitiful. Inside Han's frame, each one stands as a person living out their own day.

An Advertising Photographer's Eye

Han was more than a documentarian. He began shooting advertising photography in the late 1950s, and in 1966 he opened the Han Youngsoo Photo Studio. That is why he is counted as a pioneer of Korean advertising and fashion photography. This background runs straight through his street pictures too: a feel for dividing light from shadow, compositions that order the frame into geometry. That sense of design is why his photographs read as sophisticated even now, well beyond simple old records.

A Late Rediscovery

During his lifetime his name was barely known outside Korea. After he died in 1999, his daughter Han Seon-jeong founded the Han Youngsoo Foundation and began organizing his negatives and prints and bringing them out into the world. Recognition followed quickly. The International Center of Photography (ICP) acquired his work, the first by a Korean artist to enter its collection, and in 2017 it held his first major solo exhibition in the United States, 《Han Youngsoo: Photographs of Seoul 1956–63》. In 2021 came 《Unknown City》, presented with Leica. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) also holds his photographs.

Back Into the World, One Book at a Time

The foundation is grouping his vast body of photographs by theme and publishing them as a photobook series. An era held in one man's eyes is coming back out, one book at a time. Five volumes have been published so far, in this order.

Seoul, Modern Times(서울, 모던 타임즈)2014

Once upon a Time(꿈결 같은 시절)2015

Time Flows in River(시간 속의 강)2017

When the Spring Wind Blows(연분홍 치마가 봄바람에)2020

And Life Goes On(그리고 삶은 계속된다)2025

A Private Gaze(지극히 사적인)Due 2027. 5

And a sixth book is on the way: 《A Private Gaze》 (지극히 사적인). It gathers a more personal gaze that sat alongside his street records. Publication is planned for May 2027. Once again we will meet the faces of people who went back to living in the places the war had passed through.