[Friends of Korea] American woman's 1950s images of Korea

Adults and children overlook a harbor town, sometime between 1956 and 1959. / Courtesy of Susan Hanley

By Nancy Kelly

Imagine my curiosity and delight when, out of the blue in late 2015, I received an email from a 'Susan Hanley'…she had found the Friends of Korea website while searching the internet and reached out with a query.

Susan had close to 1,000 black-and-white images taken in Korea from October 1956 to February 1959 when she was working as an arts and crafts shop director for the U.S. Army at Camp Kaiser in modern-day Pocheon, northern Gyeonggi Province. She told me her shop was a place for the soldiers to relax, learn and do various things like leatherworking, pottery and painting, plus there was a darkroom for developing film and printing photographs. At that time the most popular thing for the soldiers was building model airplanes, flying them and all too often wrecking them.

A father laughs while holding a baby, sometime between 1956 and 1959. / Courtesy of Susan Hanley

Upon her return from Korea, her life moved on and she only printed a few of her Korean photos for her own curiosity. In 1973 she moved from New York to a farm in West Virginia where she packed them away, again forgotten, in their small oak boxes in her attic until rediscovering them in 2015. The computer age was here! So she scanned them, searched the internet and found Friends of Korea.

Three generations of Koreans, sometime between 1956 and 1959. / Courtesy of Susan Hanley

I responded immediately that we would definitely be interested to see her pictures. Susan boxed up the negatives and sent them via FEDEX. I was struck by a comment she made in our early email correspondence in which she said that "No one else knew that they even existed."

Susan told me, "When I arrived in Korea I bought my first camera at the Army PX and only later did I realize that it was the camera of all cameras ― the Rolleiflex. It taught me how to be a photographer and let me photograph people almost without them being aware, as it was held at the waist instead of the face and is nicknamed the 'belly button' camera." This camera certainly gave Susan a treasure trove of black-and-white images.

As a crafts shop director,?Susan was permitted to take the soldiers off base into the countryside for photo tours. With the freedom to travel wherever they wished, the lives of the people were open to her. Farmers working their fields, children playing, men and women of all ages, shopkeepers, schools, churches, mountains, forests, roads, farming villages with people living their everyday lives ― she told me all these were there before her.?

A man holds pipes, sometime between 1956 and 1959. / Courtesy of Susan Hanley

Her images are remarkable given the timeframe ― the late 1950s when the Army allowed no civilians in the country. The fighting of the 1950-53 Korean War had just ended, and Korea was battered, bruised and extremely poor. Camp Kaiser itself was remote and so close to the DMZ that no soldier was allowed beyond the chain-link fence encircling the camp. The Army had designated it as a 'hardship' area. Susan must have been quite an oddity ― a young American woman roaming the villages with a packet of eager U.S. soldiers with cameras.

Susan didn't speak Korean, but she must have conveyed a sense of genuine curiosity and interest that allowed her to be accepted, and to take photos ― many of which are quite intimate scenes of family life. Travel in Korea was challenging in that the dirt roads were in such deplorable condition that small U.S. military planes were used like taxis to get personnel from place to place, which allowed her to take many aerial photos of the country. Bridges, rivers, cities and villages are nearly unrecognizable, until you find a physical landmark to help get your bearings. "All the seasons of Korea were there to photograph, and they were so familiar," Susan said, "as they were like New England where I grew up."

A toddler helps himself in a shop, sometime between 1956 and 1959. / Courtesy of Susan Hanley

Friends of Korea worked with the Korean Heritage Library at the University of Southern California to digitize these images, preserving them for posterity. Susan told me that she had always been so touched by the trust and friendly acceptance everyone showed her by letting her peek into their lives that she wanted thank them by sharing these images with the people of Korea, no matter where they live now.

An elderly man has a meal, sometime between 1956 and 1959. / Courtesy of Susan Hanley

I am in awe of Susan and her adventures in Korea. What courage it must have taken to accept a job halfway around the world, in a strange country, where you know no one and don't speak the language. This was long before email, cellphones or Zoom. I am so glad that Friends of Korea was able to find a way to preserve and archive these images of a time long past forever so they may never be forgotten.

A picture of Susan Hanley, photographed somewhere in South Korea between 1956 and 1959. / Courtesy of Susan Hanley

To see the full collection, visit:
http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p15799coll67

Nancy Kelly served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Goseong, South Gyeongsang Province, from 1979 to 1981. After, she attended Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and then became the executive director of Health Volunteers Overseas. She served as president of the Friends of Korea Board from 2013 to 2017 and is currently its chief operating officer. Visit friendsofkorea.net for more information.