A black-and-white snapshot captures the facade of a dilapidated shack in southern Seoul’s Apgujeong-dong, with a torn-out roof and walls that turn out to be nothing more than a mishmash of tarps and nailed wood boards of wildly varying sizes.
A few stranded household objects indicate that the tattered house was indeed occupied at one point ― white garments hung on a clothesline far back, coal briquettes littered on one side and a handcart that was likely a source of income.
The obvious visual clash between the derelict shack and rows of identical high-rise apartments looming in the background would catch the eye of any passerby.
That was exactly the case for student photographer Kim Jung-il in 1982.
Inspired by Eugene Atget, an acclaimed French photographer who dedicated his craft to documenting the urban landscape of 19th-century Paris before its disappearance to modernization, Kim went on a self-assigned mission to record Seoul’s postwar terrain that had been transforming before his very eyes.
Sure enough, three years after his image was taken, the house and its surrounding barren land gave way to Hyundai’s flagship department store, reshaping today’s Apgujeong and the rest of the southern Gangnam District as the most affluent neighborhood in the country.
So, what was Seoul like on the cusp of modernization, early in its metamorphosis into a concrete jungle bursting with skyscrapers, high-tech subways and a population of almost 10 million?
Through the portraits of the city captured by documentarians like Kim and Lim Chung-Eui, its neighborhoods that were razed and disappeared into history over the last 40 years have gained new life.
In their photographs, Seoul still manages to present itself as a forest of organically formed villages and twisted alleys that reveal an old way of living before homogeneous rows of apartment complexes took over.
“When I was taking photos of the parts of Seoul that were about to disappear, I knew that they would undergo transformation but never imagined it to be so profound and life-altering. We couldn’t have possibly envisioned the cityscape and skyline we see today,” Kim said in a joint interview with Lim held at the Seoul National University Museum of Art (SNUMoA) in southern Seoul.
The two were among the four artists who were invited to showcase their treasured photographic collections capturing the bygone days of the metropolis at the museum’s recently wrapped-up group exhibition, “Myein, the Concave Lens in My Heart.”
‘Moon village,’ home to urban poor
Many of the places depicted in the two artists’ photographs come from different corners of “daldongnae” which once cluttered Seoul. Translated literally as “moon village,” these were communities that were built high up on mountainsides, thus allowing “a closer view” of the moon.
It’s a rather beguiling name given to the settlements formed as an inevitable byproduct of economic hardship.
The villages were largely home to urban poor and refugees who poured in from North Korea following the country’s division in 1945 and the 1950-53 Korean War as well as those from the countryside who flocked to the industrializing metropolis en masse since the 1960s in search of jobs.
For a while, the hillside communities in Sillim-dong, Bongcheon-dong, Sanggye-dong and Dogok-dong, among many others, were overlooked by the government with their hard-to-access lands cluttered with shanties and winding alleyways.
That is until advances in construction engineering and the building of new roads and bridges put these unregulated, high-altitude villages into the sights of redevelopers.
The establishment of the Urban Redevelopment Act in 1976 provided administrative gateways for Seoul to carry out the so-called “downtown renewal projects” throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This period also coincided with the country’s bid to host the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Summer Olympics, which called for rapid, large-scale beautification schemes to project to the world a new cultural image of Korea beyond its war-torn past.
“The accelerated state-led redevelopment marked the beginning of Korea’s widespread land speculation and the consequent wealth divide,” Kim noted. “In Seoul, the elements that were once considered to be part of nature or one’s organically established residence ― like the Han River, the hillsides overlooking the river and other plots of land occupied by the impoverished ― turned into objects of speculation with monetary value beyond the wildest imagination.”
Accordingly, most moon villages riddled with aging houses and tattered shacks were razed, giving way to high-rise apartment complexes, parking lots and public parks that make up the majority of Seoul we know today.
With the exception of a few still-standing communities like Guryong Village in Gangnam District, Gaemi Village in northwestern Seodaemun District and Baeksa Village in northeastern Nowon District, moon villages have become a thing of the past that now live only within the collective memory of older Seoulites.
Lim Chung-eui’s “Outer roads of Bongcheon 5-dong” (1985) / Courtesy of the artist, SNUMoA
Two documentarians’ journey to capture Seoul’s bygone days
In a way, Lim followed in the footsteps of his father Lim In-Sik (1920-98), a celebrated documentary photographer whose snapshot of nameless student soldiers with a determined look taken during the first year of the Korean War remains iconic to this day, but with a twist.
“My father was very much against the idea of me pursuing a career in photography since it was an occupation where making money was never guaranteed,” he said.
So, he decided to become the country’s first-generation architecture photographer, working alongside prominent architect Kim Swoo-Geun (1931-86) and taking up projects commissioned by government agencies and private firms. His images depicting Seoul’s newly constructed major infrastructure were delivered to the International Olympic Committee Session in Baden-Baden, West Germany, helping the city become the host of the 1988 Summer Olympics.
For his personal projects, however, his photographic subjects extended far beyond the city’s glitz and glamor and reached all the way to moon villages. Lim himself resided in a moon village tucked away in Seongdong District’s Geumho-dong for around a decade in the 1960s.
But looks of puzzlement would often follow Lim as a tall man wielding a tripod and a camera in the narrow alleyways of Sillim-dong, Bongcheon-dong and Geumho-dong. It sometimes got him into more trouble than he expected.
Some villagers would mistake him as an undercover employee sent by redevelopers preparing to evict them from their homes. He was even accused of being a North Korean spy by the police at one point for “deliberately photographing the dilapidated neighborhoods of Seoul, and not the city’s more affluent sites.”
Lim Chung-eui’s “A clothesline installed across an alleyway of Sillim 7-dong” (1985) / Courtesy of the artist, SNUMoA
“I was simply there to play my role as a witness to capture as plainly as possible the features of the village and people’s lifestyle within which still retained our traditional ways of living,” Lim said. “After all, that’s the fundamental role of photography ― a visual messenger. Despite all that trouble, it was meaningful to have been able to document the things I saw.”
An outstanding characteristic of his moon village photographs is the way the private and the communal are mingled seamlessly in terms of space.
The shared alleys became “privatized” by everyone in different yet harmonious ways. Some would carefully lay out a group of their “jangdokdae” ― traditional Korean crocks for sauces and condiments ― in the alley. Others would hang laundry on clotheslines installed temporarily across the passageway on a sunny day. There was even an entrance to someone’s bathroom located right in the middle of the pathway.
And for children, the alleys became an ideal playground to call up their neighbors to play hide and seek and other popular outdoor games.
“This was what life was once like in Seoul. It may look dismal or inconvenient in the eyes of present-day viewers, but the villagers, who didn’t have a yard of their own, were able to make the best use of the available space and created a harmonious living area,” the photographer noted.
Kim’s photographic representation of moon villages is fascinating in its own right.
As a student photographer attending Chung-Ang University, he chose some 40 sites to shoot that were designated as redevelopment districts in 1982 based on an article he read.
So, with his camera and a checklist in hand, he went on a personal artistic mission.
Taking cues from Atget whose documentary photos of Paris were taken mostly at dawn and therefore showed no signs of life, Kim also decided to omit people from most of his images ― but for a different reason.
“I thought it would be impudent of me to feature those residing in moon villages as mere props in my photos. I wanted to be careful when including them in the scene and avoid any semblance of so-called ‘poverty porn,'” the 67-year-old told The Korea Times.
His purpose of producing the series he later named “Landscape of Memory” (direct translation) had a few layers: objective yet aesthetic documentation of history that can serve as a concrete reminder of the moon villages’ existence.
Accordingly, whether the subject is a shanty, public toilet, church, or an abandoned plot of land, the documentarian captured everything as if shooting a frontal portrait, transforming it into the protagonist of a new unstated narrative.
Kim Jungil’s “Bongcheon-dong” (1982) / Courtesy of the artist, SNUMoA
Modern Korea has been great at “eliminating ‘outdated’ infrastructure without leaving a trace but has failed to document it properly,” according to Lim. That’s why, he continued, the surviving photographic records that offer a glimpse into the country’s major transformation in the 20th century should be preserved for future generations.
“Frankly speaking, such materials need to be purchased by and maintained in state-level archives,” the 79-year-old said. “After all, these records are more than just a part of the photographer’s personal project; they have immortalized a portion of the nation’s understudied history.”
