▲ The woman pictured above is the late Kim Daejeong, the thick folds of time evident in her face from her time working in the seas around the Udo Island lighthouse. Photo by Kim Heungku

“Haenyeo are the first thing you see when looking deeper and beyond Jeju’s natural beauty.”

Photographer Kim Heungku, now 36 and hailing from North Gyeongsang Province, first saw haenyeo, Jeju’s diving women, while visiting as a college student.

Thoughts of his sick mother were at the forefront of his mind as he reflected on Korean motherhood. “It was my destiny to come to Jeju,” he says when recalling those first encounters.

His photographic repertoire now includes the Jeju Massacre and shamanism, but it was only through talking to the haenyeo that such subjects, so dear to the women’s hearts, were shared with him.

Kim’s work thus became focused on not merely portraying their hardship or disappearing way of life, but as symbols of strong motherhood and bravery, diving unaided to great depths.

Kim frequently uses the term jomnyeo to describe the women, one of the dialect words used by the women themselves instead of haenyeo, which was used under Japanese rule.

The woman pictured above is the late Kim Daejeong, the thick folds of time evident in her face from her time working in the seas around the Udo Island lighthouse, and even as far as Vladivostok, Russia, on overseas “chulga” dives.

These expeditionary trips began in the 1900s domestically to nearby South Jeolla Province and went as far as Hamgyeong Province (now North Korea). By the 1930s, 4,000 haenyeo were leaving for around six months at a time, reaching Japan, Russia and China.

Despite being the backbone of the island economy for hundreds of years, as fewer women take up the tough life of a haenyeo, they may disappear within a generation. They are down from 3,452 in 1995 to 2,755 in 2010, with 800 over 80 years old and 80 percent over 60.

To help halt this decline, Jeju haenyeo culture is set to again be put up for consideration for UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity inscription this year. Kim says that even though the jomnyeo cannot escape the aging process, “the original haenyeo culture and customs must continue.”

The photographer is doing his bit to increase awareness through private exhibitions held in 2011 in Seoul, Busan and Jeju titled “Jomnyeo - 10 Year Footage of the Disappearing Haenyeo.”

Curator Song Su-jeong described his images thus:

“One can find their lives of hardship unfold through the many layers of these photographs. They accepted their fates, not because they were women, but because they were mothers, and embrace the island of rock and wind to this day.

Kim himself says that Jeju’s three abundances should be rewritten as “rock, wind and mothers.”

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▲ Photo courtesy Kim Heungku

In addition to his private exhibitions held in Seoul, Busan and Jeju in 2011, titled “Jomnyeo - 10 Years of Footage of the Disappearing Haenyeo,” Kim Heungku won the GEO Photograph Award (Grand Prize) for his “Jomnyeo Life Feature Story” in 2003. The leading judge said this of Kim’s work:

“Taking a picture can be an act of violence against the subject of the image. In Kim’s work, however, the subjects retain their agency through his affection and sincerity for Jeju haenyeo.”

He currently works with the Anzenberger Agency in Austria and also captures images of the hidden side of society under the theme “Gap,” with his work being exhibited at the Goeun Museum of Photography.