Jeehey Kim, Ph.D.
Program Chair
Jeehey Kim’s research encompasses the history of photography, visual culture, and film studies in East Asia. Kim’s first book, Photography and Korea (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2023), is the first book on the history of Korean photography in English. She is currently completing a second book, Photography and Death: Funerary Photo-Portraiture in East Asia, and has written widely on vernacular photographic practices, Cold War-era salon photography networks, and documentary film and visual culture in relation to gender politics in East Asia, with recent essays appearing in Aperture, the Journal of War and Culture Studies, and Trans Asia Photography, for which she also guest-edited a special issue on Asian American photography.
As a curator, Kim has organized exhibitions such as “Pyongyang Bookstore” at the Seoul Metropolitan Library, which presented North Korean artists of the 1950s and ’60s, and has organized international symposia on East Asian photography at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Kim earned her doctorate at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, with a dissertation on funerary portrait photography in East Asia, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.
Publications
Photography and Korea, London: Reaktion Books; Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2023)
“BECOMING SEOUL,” Aperture, No. 260, Fall, 2025, 46-53.
“The Politics of Salon Photography: The Ideological Function of East Asian Photography in the Cold War Era,” Journal of War and Culture Studies Vol. 18, No. 2 (2025): 1-19.
“Wandering Through Modern Korea: Race, Class, and National Identity in Lee Gap Chul’s Photography.” In Lee Gap Chul: Another Landscape 1979-2000, Seoul: IANN Books, 2025, 129-146.
“Continuities and Ruptures: Little History of Korean Art Photography.” In The Radiance: Beginnings of Korean Art Photography. Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, 2025, 97-104.
“Contagious Disease and Visual Media in Colonial Korea.” In Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media, ed. Ling Zhang, Pao-chen Tang, and Yuqian Yan, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2025, 31-53.
“Radiant Portraits: Women Embracing Their Roots,” 2023 Changdong International Artist Residency. Seoul: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2024, 199-202.
“Photography of Korea in the United States.” In Wonders and Witness: Contemporary Photography from Korea. Seoul: Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2023, 139-145.
“International Photography Competitions and Internationalism of Korean Photography in the 1950s-1970s.” In Inside Out: A History of Korean Photography, 1929-1982, Seoul: Museum Hanmi, 2023, 64-84.
“Photography, Love, and the Afterlife in East Asia,” Photography and East Asian Art, ed. Wu Hung and Chelsea Foxwell, Chicago: Art Media Resources and Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, 2021, 143-170; (translated in Chinese) “æ”å½±ã€æƒ…愛與來世，在æ±äºž” Voices of Photography, 33 (2022): 26-36.
“Contemporary Photography Magazines in Korea and Taiwan: Vostok & Voice of Photography,” Trans Asia Photography Review, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring, 2020): https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/7977573.0010.211?view=text;rgn=main.
“Pyongyang Bookstore: North Korean Artists through Their Books,” in Pyongyang Bookstore, exh. cat., Seoul: Han Sangeon Yeonghwa Yeon’guso, July 2018, unpaginated.
“Wandering Ghosts of the Cold War,” Journal of Korean Studies Vol. 22, No. 2 (Fall, 2017): 413-431.
“The Development of Photo Studios in Korea by Lee Kyungmin,” Translation of the Korean text, Trans Asia Photography Review Vol. 4, Issue 2 (Spring 2014), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0004.203.
“Death and Photography: Politics of Funerary Photo-Portraiture,” in The 2012 Seoul Photo Festival: Village Community and Photo Archives, exh. cat., Seoul: Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul City Hall, Seoul Museum of History, November-December 2012, 235 – 247.
“Memory of the Dead and Responsibility of the Living: Noh Suntag’s Forgetting Machines (2006-2007),” Trans Asia Photography Review Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Fall 2011), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0002.110.
“Korean Funerary Photo-Portrait: Vernacular Photographic Practice as Parallax,” Photographies Vol. 2, Issue 1 (2009): 7 – 20.
“Deadpan Rhetoric: We don’t have an alibi,” in Geoffrey Batchen, Jeehey Kim, and Jung Joon Lee, Deadpan: Photography, History, Politics, exh. cat., New York: The Graduate Center, City University of New York, May 2008, unpaginated.
“Difference in Feminism: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Post-Colonialism,” The International Journal of the Arts in Society Vol. 2, Issue 2 (2007): 81 – 92.
Courses
ARH 324 –Introduction to the History of Photography
ARH 324 — 20th-Century Photography
ARH 424A & 524A –History of Photography: 19th-Century Photography
ARH 596 –Vernacular Photographies
ARH 424A & 524A –History of Photography: Black Lives Matter
ARH 596 –Photography and Empire
ARH 424C & 524C –History of Asian Photography
ARH 596 — Global Indigenous Photography
ARH 480 & 580 –Postcolonialism and Contemporary Art in East Asia
Asian Photography Symposium Series
