Category: Social Sciences, Text, English, Photography, Cornell University
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As an avid, well-trained photographer, sketcher and recorder, Straight took about 380 photographs and painted a very small number of sketches during his two spells in Korea in 1904 and 1905. Our aim has been to identify and select about two hundred of these and incorporate these materials into a project which amounts to a visual and contextual narrative of Korea at a most critical juncture in its more recent, modern history. The photographs document landscapes, urban scenes, people (both common, notable or noble ones), and, most interestingly, record numerous important events.
Historical Context The Visions collection includes the written and photographed experiences of Europeans and Americans who traveled to Southeast Asia during the period of imperialism. The peoples of Southeast Asia experienced waves of colonization beginning in 1511 when the Portuguese took Melaka, a strategic and thriving port city on the Malay Peninsula. The Spanish established a colony in the Philippines which they ruled from the 1560s until 1899 when the United States ousted the Spanish and governed the colony until Philippine independence in 1946. The Dutch gradually conquered the areas known today as Indonesia beginning in 1596 and ending after WWII.
