The Cultural Politics of Asian Life in Carl Mydans's Photojournalism of Tule Lake and Yosu-Sunchon

This article turns to two pieces of photojournalism in Life magazine by Carl Mydans to illuminate the visual economy of American militarism. By juxtaposing the photographs of the Tule Lake Japanese American incarceration camp and those of the Yosu-Sunchon rebellion in US-occupied Korea, the article explores the visual representations of military violence in these photographs with an eye to how US military violence was rendered civilized in comparison to the savage violence of Koreans. The visual repertoire of Asian lives in the photographs ranges from what the article calls “endurable life” to “liminal life” based on the photographed subject's receptiveness to Cold War racial liberalism and its governmentality. While Mydans's photojournalism of Tule Lake and Yosu-Sunchon precede the outbreak of the Korean War, the article suggests that the photographs of Asians under US militarism in the years leading up to 1950 show the conditions of the American public's reception of Korean War photographs, which Susan Sontag in 1973 characterized as “unanimous in its acquiescence to the Korean War.”