When photographs refuse to speak: Heinkuhn Oh’s Gwangju Story

Abstract

Gwangju Story (1995) incorporates the diverse dimensions of reality surrounding the filming of a movie recreating the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a democratic struggle against a martial law government that took place in Gwangju, Korea. For the reenactment, Gwangju citizens intermingled with actors and played the roles of protesters and soldiers. They were joined by civic groups demanding the truth about the event and policemen overseeing the filming. Hence, the past and the present intertwined, fact and fiction overlapped, and memories and personal experiences were incorporated into existing history. In contrast to this heightened complexity, Heinkuhn Oh’s photographs are muted documentary images, disguising their constructed nature by conveying uncertainty and lacking violence or drama. This paper associates this ambiguity with Korea’s transition to democracy in the 1990s, wherein the uprising began to be reevaluated as a heroic struggle for democracy. With this newly obtained liberty, the photographer embodied the unstable status of the event in Korean history and offered a critical response to the historicization currently in progress. The use of the medium in the series also marks a break with the past. Destabilizing the conventions of documentary-style photography, Gwangju Story demonstrates the expanded use of the medium in contemporary Korean photography.