Visualizing Seoul’s Landscapes: Percival Lowell and the Cultural Biography of Ethnographic Images

Abstract

Scenic views of Seoul’s palaces, gardens, and gates have attracted scholars, collectors, artists, conservators, and millions of tourists for more than a century. As iconic markers confirming and promoting national identity at home and abroad, the physical monuments as well as their images reproduced as postcards, posters, and dioramas are embraced as tangible sources of the continuity of Chosŏn dynastic traditions and popular “must-see” destinations. This article investigates one of the oldest intact photographic collections of Korea assembled by Percival Lowell in 1883–84. As the first American diplomat armed with a camera, he is known to have taken the earliest portraits of King Kojong, photographs of the inner sanctums of palaces and gardens and officialdom, and snapshots of street life in and beyond the capital’s gates. Lowell’s 1885 publication, Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm, published by the leading literary press in Boston, Ticknor and Company, was well received as the first eyewitness account of Korea richly illustrated with twenty-five full-page original photographs. At the time, Lowell’s travelogue was not only regarded as the definitive scholarship on Korea but also influenced the circulation of ethnographic images of the “the Land of the Morning Calm” in the Western imaginary. This article analyzes the subjects and objects of his “camera-eye” as not only personal mementos of Lowell’s trip but also as the earliest visual guides to the Hermit Kingdom that had just opened up to the outside world.