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 started doing pure street fashion, especially in Korea, in 2002. A lot of people call my street photography a waste of time. Technically that was true, because I was supposed to be doing my dissertation. And I wasn’t doing it. I didn’t finish my dissertation from 2002 when I was supposed to finish it the next year — I didn’t finish it until 2015. I began to take photography more seriously along the road to being an academic. And that photography influenced my methodology and direction. And what I realized later is that even my documentary street photography, back in 2002, was deeply ethnographic. But I realized it was just a piece of the longest possible period of fieldwork that any person does. So I spent 12 years doing visual fieldwork — I like to think of it that way,” he said.

“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.”

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.

“So by this time I’m doing what I now call photo sartorial elicitation; these photo sartorial techniques are popular in anthropology. Photo elicitation is a technique where you take a picture, show it to whoever your informant is and ask what does this picture make you feel when you look at yourself in the picture. And then you elicit social information; it’s sort of like an interview. However, I use photo sartorial elicitation to talk about eliciting social data by focusing our interaction around clothing. This is not different really from how an interview is used by social investigators,” he said.

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. What I’d like to point out here is that my photography is a key to access. And it’s a reason to interact with these people. My Seoul Street Studios identity helps me interact with, honestly, a lot of other Instagram models. So I argue that this kind of identity diffraction across Korea, a lot of young people have not just one or two but several Instagram accounts,” he said. “One of the dominant features of mobile media is how it further fetishizes the analogue by way of its obsession with modes of realism. That kind of applies to this game. Camera phone practices, as an extension of photography and snapshots, are about performing normalcy. However, because of the distributive and network logic of mobile phones, one is now left to contextualize these renowned shots and render them newsworthy and relevant to the receiver. That all seems to be relevant and interesting at this point.”

Hurt received his doctorate from UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies. He also started Korea’s first street fashion blog in 2006 and published the first English-language book about Korean fashion in 2009. He researches youth, street fashion and digital subcultures in Seoul while lecturing on cultural theory and art history at the Korea National University of Arts. He was the first researcher to focus on Korea’s street fashion hyperculture and has been shooting and publishing about it since 2007. He also does cultural consulting on Korea for companies from Google to Pinterest, from P&G to Meta, and continues such research that coheres around his ethnographic photography.

Bereket Alemayehu is an Ethiopian photo artist, social activist and writer based in Seoul. He’s also co-founder of Hanokers, a refugee-led social initiative, and freelance contributor for Pressenza Press Agency.