Photographer documents fading culture amidst South Korean wave

A 77-year-old photographer and chronicler of the Korean diaspora in Central Asia opens up about his life's work and the evolving identity of the Koryo-saram community in a recent report by Al Jazeera.

Viktor An, 77, is sifting through a trove of history in the wooden drawers and cabinets that line his living room. His cluttered apartment, located a short climb up the stairs in a Soviet-era building in a verdant suburb of Tashkent, serves as a disorganized archive of his life’s work capturing the Korean diaspora in Central Asia, known as Koryo-saram.  

An’s parents hailed from Primorsky Krai, situated in the Siberian far east of the former USSR, where many Koreans from northern Korea had settled since the late 19th century. This generation would not only conclude the era of this significant migration but also usher in a new chapter.   Rising xenophobia and fears that Koreans might be working as spies for the Japanese empire led to a drastic measure by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1937, resulting in the deportation of around 172,000 Koreans to the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Born in Uzbekistan about a decade later, An studied hydraulic engineering before taking on various roles as a mechanic, radio and cinema technician, and later, unsuccessfully, as a farmer of onions and watermelons. It was only in his 30s that he discovered his true calling as a photographer for Lenin Kichi (Lenin’s Banner), a Korean-language newspaper based in Almaty, Kazakhstan.   Over the following decades, An traveled throughout Central Asia, capturing images of harvests, festivals, folk concerts, and the daily lives of the Korean community.  

A wiry man with a thick white goatee, An moves energetically through his cluttered apartment. His loose brown fleece blurs as he quickly prepares tea, points out a photo of his parents on the wall, flips through stacks of aged newspapers, and maneuvers around a large sculpture made from old camera flashes.   He shows a photo from the early 1990s depicting two men pounding rice to make tteok, a traditional Korean rice cake, preserving a moment from the past. “This moment, I saved how it was before,” he remarks.   After the Soviet Union's collapse, his newspaper was renamed Koryo Ilbo (Korean Diary) and began publishing in both Russian and Korean, reflecting the assimilation of many Koryo-saram readers who had lost their Korean language and the distinctive Koryo-mar dialect.   “Because this dialect is not written down, it’s disappearing,” he tells Al Jazeera. “Especially among the older generation … because the younger generation doesn’t know it.”  

Today, An is a fine art photographer with exhibitions in South Korea and across Europe. An's career shift coincided with the liberalizing reforms of the 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev, which increased personal freedoms and allowed for greater government criticism. The opening of classified historical archives in 1991 unveiled numerous atrocities, particularly those committed during Stalin's era, revealing the full extent of the Korean deportations from Siberia to Central Asia.  

“We knew some people had been deported and faced repression, but we didn't know the full scale,” he explains.  

An points to a bilingual monograph of his work, flipping to a page featuring his first artistic piece from 1988. The image shows a triangular Soviet envelope placed by a window, with light filtering into a dusty, cobweb-laden room.