KOREAN FUNERARY PHOTO‐PORTRAITURE

Abstract

This essay challenges an established understanding of photography in the West through a vernacular photographic practice in Korea. Funerary photo‐portraiture in Korea collapses the dichotomy of cult value and exhibition value which Walter Benjamin Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”. In Illuminations, Edited by: Arendt, Hannah. 217–52. New York: Schocken. [Google Scholar] establishes via photography in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. It also contests the Barthean notion of photography as a memento mori as well as the Freudian approach to the portrait photograph of the dead as a fetish. Korean funerary photo‐portraiture demonstrates how vernacular photography interweaves personal memory and historical memory, functioning as a reminder of presence rather than absence. A different notion of death underlies how funerary photo‐portraiture functions in Korea. In this essay, I attempt to investigate how one can explicate the Other's experience, suggesting a self‐reflexive methodology and Kojin Karatani's Karatani, Kojin. 2005. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Cambridge, MA: MIT P. Trans. Sabu Kosho [Google Scholar] concept of “parallax”.

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