The Henri Cartier-Bresson of South Korea

During Han’s lifetime—he died in 1999—he was primarily known for his commercial work. In 1966, he founded Han’s Photo, one of the first studios to specialize in advertising (cosmetics, electronics) as South Korea’s consumer age was ushered in. He occasionally showed his artsier street photography, and published selections in the 1987 book “Korean Lives” (삶). In the introduction to that text, he wrote, “The eye of the camera opened my own eyes to the human situation. . . . We have grown along with the nation in an era of rapid modernization.” After his death, his daughter Han Sunjung devoted herself to his archives, leading a project of sorting through thousands of negatives and prints, trying to make sense of what she describes as “the puzzle of Han’s fragmented memos, stuck at angles on files of film, photo captions and descriptions published in catalogues.” So far, she has published four books of his pictures, organized thematically. Exhibitions have been mounted at museums in Korea, France, Hungary, and the U.S. I saw a selection from the latest book, “When the Spring Wind Blows,” focussed on images of women, at a gallery show last year in Manhattan.

Han practiced a genre I might call abstract vérité. There is always the human form on the one hand, and lines and shapes on the other. According to the artist Emile Rubino, Han generally kept a “consistent physical distance” from his subjects; he worked at enough of a remove to allow things to happen, in contrast to the closeup “dominant documentarian aesthetic of that period.” With distance comes so much scenic detail—and movement. Consider the coiled suspense in what initially appears to be a stock-still portrait. The setting is some kind of curio shop: there’s a glass-fronted cabinet, messily stuffed with random things; the tile flooring is stained and cracked. A woman wearing a traditional two-piece hanbok dress—dark jeogori top; light, flowery chima skirt—and with a Hollywood-style soft bob sits in a metal chair, reading a broadsheet. But she isn’t just sitting. She folds herself so acutely that her face is hardly visible. She pours all her concentration into the newspaper. Her posture of absorption is further intensified by the outward splaying of her feet, wrapped in elf-toed beoseon booties.

The formal composition at work in that portrait is even more evident in Han’s aerial landscapes, shot from bridges and promontories. In one, five women in white hanbok, carrying bundles of white laundry on their heads, form a tight, diagonal spiral (in response to gusts of wind?) against dark fields of grass and cropland. In another, overlooking a Han River marina, there are three interlocking layers: water (most of the picture), hilly horizon, and, at left, a scalloped edge of rowboats and storage sheds that pulls your eyes downward. A small figure of a man in swimming briefs, seen from behind, stretches his arms into a “T.” He is just about to dive off a rickety river barge, but, for this moment, his white body resembles an ornamental cross.