The feature gathers images of summer life in Korea from the mid-to-late twentieth century, including the custom of weaving and hanging cricket cages, tea served with ice, and washing one's back at the well.

How heat was managed

Before air conditioning, keeping cool meant arranging water, shade and airflow. Cross-ventilation through a raised wooden hall, the low temperature of well water, and sprinkling water across the yard in the evening all worked on the same principle.

These practices disappeared along with urbanisation and changes in housing. As yards and wells went, the habits attached to them lost their place too.

Photographs as record

The value of such images lies in documentation rather than aesthetics. Housing structure, clothing, vessels and village layout are captured together, making them source material for social history. A single photograph can carry more concrete information than several written accounts.

Similar summer records survive in ethnic Chinese households in Korea. Chinese homes in Incheon and Seoul mixed Korean courtyard layouts with Chinese domestic practice, and that mixture is most clearly verified where photographs remain.

Hwagyo Sibo regards the documentary value of old photographs kept by ethnic Chinese families as significant. Such material is personal memory and, often, the only surviving evidence of how a community actually lived.