Some 1,056 photos taken by the U.S. Navy for military purposes in late August and early September 1945 of Seoul, Busan, Incheon, Gunsan, Jinju, and Masan were released on Tuesday. The photos were donated to Cheju National University by Dr. David Nemeth, a professor of geography and planning at the University of Toledo, in the late 1980s.
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A photo of downtown Seoul taken on Sept. 9, 1945. It shows buildings that still stand today, including Deoksu Palace, Seoul City Hall, and the Seoul City Council Hall.
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They come in small (23 cm x 23 cm) and large formats (48cm x 23cm), taken on Aug. 28-29 and on Sept. 9-10, right after national liberation on Aug. 15, 1945. Except for Seoul, all the other locations are ports. The U.S. military authorities seem to have taken photos of major areas, first of all, to obtain information on Korea after the collapse of Japan. The photos are marked with dates and names of locations, the latter in Japanese -- Seoul as "Keijo" and Incheon as "Jinsen." Most of the photos were taken directly from above at 3,000 m above sea level, while some were taken obliquely.
Oh Sang-hak, a professor at Cheju National University, said, "The photos were not taken by us, but they carry great significance in being the first serious aerial photos of major areas of Korea." During the colonial era, Japanese authorities also took aerial photos, but only of downtown Seoul.
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A photo from 1945 shows Dongdaemun (East Gate) and the Cheonggye Stream. Mt. Namsan is in the upper part.
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The National Geographic Information Institute also keeps an archive of aerial photos taken for cartographical purposes, but they were taken after Korea signed an agreement on aerial photo surveys with the Netherlands in 1966. CNU said it also received another donation from Nemeth consisting of 13 boxes of aerial photos taken by U.S. military authorities of Kyushu, Honshu and Okinawa in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines in 1944 and 1945.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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