작품 상세

Vintage silver print 16,9 x 25,2 cm (6.7 x 9.8 in) Photographer's copyright agency stamp on the reverse, annotations reading "GI's aiming entertaining girls, Village Yon Sul Gol, north of Soeul, South Korea" and neg.number "61-15-41/13" in ink and pencil on the reverse LITERATURE René Burri, One World Photographs et collages 1950-1983, Bern 1984, p. 54; Hans-Michael Koetzle (ed.), René Burri, Fotografien, Berlin 2004, p. 325. One of his countless journeys took the Swiss Magnum photographer René Burri to South Korea in 1961. Together with journalist Bernie Kalb, he was reporting for The New York Times about a country in which a clique of officers led by General Park Chung Hee had seized power two weeks previously through a putsch. Upon arrival, René Burri experienced the atmosphere as eerily silent. In the feature Again Korea Is Being Tested, published in The New York Times on November 12, 1961, Kalb described South Korea as a country "in which people have no living recollection of times when their country's fate was not damned, when their lives were not unhappy". In the evening, René Burri followed American GIs to the village Tae Song Dong, where the soldiers sought distraction with ladies of the night. In a nightclub, Burri took the photograph whose right half shows a young Korean prostitute caressing a soldier's ear lasciviously with her half-open mouth. The left half of the image, where another kissing couple can be discerned, is out of focus and adds to the atmospheric composition. As so often, Burri seeks out a secondary venue, placing what seems inconsequential at the centre and telling stories invariably focused on the human element.