This talk explores how Black presence has been represented in Korean and Japanese photographic cultures from the mid-twentieth century onward. The Korean War and the Second World War brought large numbers of U.S. military personnel - including Black American soldiers - into both countries. Their arrival shaped not only social interactions on the ground but also the ways Blackness was visually framed and understood in East Asia, particularly in relation to mixed-race children born to Asian mothers and Black GIs.
Photographers in Korea and Japan turned their cameras toward the daily lives of these Black military communities, producing images that intersected with broader shifts in geopolitics and cultural perception. At the same time, international photography competitions that flourished in the 1960s introduced African subjects to East Asian audiences. One striking example is a widely circulated Japanese photography magazine that featured on its cover an arresting portrait of a Mucubal woman from Angola - submitted by a Portuguese amateur photographer. This visual influx unfolded alongside the significant deployment of Black American soldiers to the Vietnam War.
Taken together, these postwar photographic encounters reveal how portrayals of Black culture in Asia were entangled with the legacies of colonialism and the pressures of the Cold War. These forces both enabled and constrained possibilities for Afro-Asian solidarity, leaving a complex visual record that continues to shape contemporary understandings of race, identity, and transnational encounter in the region.
We also invite you to explore the rest of this year’s series which includes exciting research from leading thinkers Anne Strachan Cross & Matthew Fox-Amato, Vindhya Buthpitiya, Leigh Raiford, Zahid R. Chaudhary and Tiffany Fairey. Explore season two, view recordings, and register for all events here.
By/For: Photography & Democracy is a collaborative partnership between three photographic historians, Dr. Tom Allbeson, Dr. Colleen O’Reilly, and Helen Trompeteler. Our collective investigates photography’s assumed democratic credentials as an art form and a medium of mass communication. We believe a historical perspective on the complex relationship between photography and democracy is critical to understanding how the medium and related visual technologies can address the social and political issues of our time.
By/For: Photography & Democracy: War, Movement, and the Camera: Black Lives in Korean and Japanese Photography
Friday, 2 October 2026 at 13.00 (Eastern Time) / 1800 (BST).
Dr Jeehey Kim (Associate Professor of Art History, University of Arizona)
Learn more and register here.
