Ethnographer explores intersection of photography, feminism, digital culture
What’s the connection between ethnographic photography and feminist discourse in Korea? Perhaps the best scholar to address that question is Michael W. Hurt, PhD, an ethnographic photographer and professor whose artistic journey intertwines academia, cultural exploration and what he calls “screen feminism.”
With decades of experience capturing the essence of youth culture, street fashion and digital subcultures through the lens of ethnographic photography, he gave an interesting lecture to Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) Korea on the topic, titled “Jessi, Screen Feminism, and the Artistic Practice of Korean Instagram Models,” on April 9 at FastFive Tower near Seoul City Hall.
His passion for documentary photography in spending 23 years doing visual fieldwork merged with his academic interests, resulting in research on digital subcultures and the intersection of fashion and identity in Seoul, evolved into an ethnography study.
“I’ve been interested in consumption, identity and consumption as identity. And this started by simply observing people in the streets of Seoul. So my interest in ethnographic photography, a kind of anthropological people photography, has remained, I think, a constant through my work,” he said.
One of Hurt’s main inquiries lies in his focus on Korea’s street fashion hyperculture, a realm filled with artistic expression and social commentary. He has had an increasing interest in how women were busy being women and was documenting moments of what Judith Butler calls “gender performativity.”
Rather than taking pictures of random strangers in public, he started posing people for portraits and began using models later.
“So pretty soon both my photographic and ethnographic interaction techniques were getting better and started to gel,” he said.
Through his camera lens and academic research, he investigates emergent digital subcultures, shedding light on diverse topics such as the political economy of the “pay model” on Instagram, Seoul’s drag underground and the youth-centric LGBTQ movement in Korea.
In his exploration of Korea’s Instagram culture, Hurt revealed some stories of artistic production intertwined with feminist traces. He asserts the limitations of Western feminism that tend to manifest as overtly political, with its characteristics of public demonstrations, marches and political action, whereas Korean feminism advocates for more subtle shades of understanding of feminist expressions within deep digital spaces, by engaging in what he terms “screen feminism.” These individuals harness the power of digital platforms to challenge societal norms and redefine notions of femininity. As he highlighted, they must operate under semiotic cover, using the plausible deniability of the “bukae,” sub-character or alter ego, in the name of art to not be accused of being Western-style feminists.
“In terms of a Korean feminist movement, you might not necessarily see it manifest as, ‘We want our rights,’ and go out to the streets and do that in (a) Western feminism (way), but it may manifest in a different subtextual way.”