뉴욕 한국문화원의 제주해녀 사진전시회
New Yorker 잡지에 소개된 제주해녀 사진 전시회
2014년 제주해녀 유네스코 무형문화재 등재 신청
90세 넘는 해녀도 활동 중 (평균 연령 60세+)
산소통 없이 10미터 바닷물속 아래 잠수해 2분 정도 해물 채취
하루 평균 5시간-6시간 작업
해녀 마지막 세대가 될 것
For hundreds of years, women in the South Korean island province of Jeju have made their living harvesting seafood by hand from the ocean floor. Known as haenyeo, or sea women, they use no breathing equipment, although a typical dive might last around two minutes and take them as deep as ten metres underwater. Wearing old-fashioned headlight-shaped scuba masks, most dive with lead weights strapped around their waists to help them sink faster. A round flotation device called a tewak, about the size of a basketball, sits at the surface of the water with a net hanging beneath it to collect the harvest. Some use a sharp tool to dig conch, abalone, and other creatures from the crevices on the seafloor.
The photographer Hyung S. Kim regularly went to Jeju between 2012 and 2014 in order to photograph the haenyeo. He set up a plain white backdrop near the shore, and would persuade divers to have their pictures taken as they emerged from the water, usually after five or six hours of work. “This was a very difficult process,” Kim says. “They were not used to being photographed, especially against an artificially created background, so they would often avoid me entirely.” The resulting portraits (which are currently on display at the Korean Cultural Service in New York, in prints that span from floor to ceiling) show what will likely be the last generation of haenyeo. Of the approximately twenty-five hundred active divers today (down from more than twenty thousand in the nineteen-sixties), the vast majority are over the age of sixty. The youngest is thirty-eight, and the oldest woman Kim photographed was over ninety. Last year, South Korea applied to have the haenyeo added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
“For me, the photos of the haenyeo reflect and overlap with the images I have of my mother and grandmother,” Kim says. “They are shown exactly as they are, tired and breathless. But, at the same time, they embody incredible mental and physical stamina, as the work itself is so dangerous; every day they cross the fine line between life and death. I wanted to capture this extreme duality of the women: their utmost strength combined with human fragility.”
“Haenyeo” is on view at the Korean Cultural Service through April 10th.
Hyung S. Kim’s answers were translated, from Korean, by Mickey Yoon-Jung Hyun.
(03/29/2015 By Andrea Denhoed of The New Yorker)
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/sea-women-of-south-korea
