Shooting for Change

“Jung Joon Lee boldly draws the reader into intimate and unsettling engagements with historical memory through a masterful interpretation of photographs that have shaped political and social imaginaries of postwar Korea. This book courageously revisits both the turbulent and ambivalent emotional worlds of US military occupation, patriarchal authoritarianism, and political protest, forcing discomfiting considerations about the boredom of sex work, sardonic tropes of family happiness, and the mundanity of political protest.” - Rachael Miyung Joo, author of Transnational Sport: Gender, Media, and Global Korea

“Renouncing the ‘homological’ nationality of ‘Korean photography’ by embracing the multiple and disobedient times of the camera, Jung Joon Lee’s investigation of ‘heterotemporality’ provides an exemplary frame for grasping the complex relations between media, ideology, place, and history. This is a richly rewarding and bracingly innovative analysis.” - Christopher Pinney, coeditor with the PhotoDemos Collective of, Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination

“The book's interdisciplinarity courageously confronts the legitimately pressing methodological convolutions of the day with grace and rigor by pulling together photo studies, media studies, postcolonial theory, diaspora studies, and critical Asian studies. The im­pact of Lee's on­to-epis­te­mo­log­i­cal pro­ject should be felt powerfully even by scholars of Asia whose primary objects of study may not include photography." - Jae Won Edward Chung, Journal of Asian Studies

“Lee’s critique of gendered historicization of photography critically reveals the complex relationship between photography and militarism in postwar South Korea, and it is sure to enrich readers who are in the field of art history, as well as Korean studies, Asian American studies, and gender studies.”

“This contemporary discourse digs into enduring questions of how images affect our social consciousness.”