Description:

In Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press, 2024), Jung Joon Lee examines photographic practices under normalized conditions of militarism. The book treats Korea’s transnational militarism as a lens to reconsider how images are officially and culturally read over time. In this talk, Lee focuses on the U.S. military camptowns in South Korea—imagined spaces for most Koreans beyond the country’s sovereignty in the name of peacekeeping. Lee analyzes gendered and racialized representations of camptowns and their readings through the history of racial capitalism, exploring Black worldmaking vis-à-vis transpacific experiences of de facto segregation and anti-Black racism. Lee draws on Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home and Yong Suk Kang’s 1982 photo series From Dongducheon to illustrate these themes.

Jung Joon Lee is an Associate Professor of art history at Rhode Island School of Design. Lee’s research explores the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies, decoloniality, and gender and sexuality. Lee is currently working on a monograph project exploring photography and art exhibitions as spaces of transoceanic collaboration, kinship making, and repair. Lee was a 2022-23 Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University and visiting scholar at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Communication and Arts in 2022. Lee received her Ph.D. in art history from CUNY Graduate Center.