In December 1996, a photograph taken from Seoul Tower seemed no more important than dozens of other images captured during my first trip to South Korea. It was taken after a long day of exploration as the sun was setting, with no context for landmarks along the skyline.
The journal entry from that day focused on museums, palaces, dirty laundry, a partially ruined roll of film, and a city I explored largely on foot. The skyline itself received only a brief mention. But I remember the long climb up the mountain to take a photo, and how I would never be happy with the quality of the result.
Three decades later, I wish I had gone back the following morning and taken more. That overlooked photograph became the central focus of a curiosity that had been 72 years in the making.
The story began long before the 1996 trip. In 1954, Milwaukee photographer Bruce Kremer photographed Seoul from the slopes of Namsan, the mountain that rises above the center of the city. His image was made shortly after the Korean War armistice halted active fighting on the peninsula. The view captured a capital still recovering from destruction, with a low-rise urban landscape stretching across the basin beneath the surrounding mountains.
I first encountered Bruce Kremer’s 1954 photograph of Seoul in 2021, through a collection of his Korean War-era slides preserved by the Milwaukee County Historical Society after his daughter sought a home for the images.
At the time, I found his other photos more interesting, as they documented daily Korean life as the nation rebuilt itself after a devastating war. Seoul is one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas and among the most transformed cities of the modern era.
The city that emerged from war in the 1950s bears little visual resemblance to the skyline visible from Namsan today. Yet I never thought about doing a “then and now” photograph, which is something I have done to show the transformation of historical places.
Back in 2021, all I had was my 1996 photo for a personal comparison. Like Kremer’s image, mine was taken from Namsan, the mountain historically known as Mokmyeoksan, that rises along the southern edge of Seoul’s old city center.
But the structure I used for my view did not exist in 1954. Today known as N Seoul Tower, and long familiar to visitors as Seoul Tower or Namsan Tower, it was built decades after Kremer made his photograph.
It is now one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, and featured in the epic confrontation at the end of “Kpop Demon Hunters.” Built atop Namsan, the tower provides panoramic views of the capital and has long been a destination for both residents and visitors.
The circumstances surrounding that 1996 visit reflected a different moment in South Korea’s development. Seoul had already been remade by decades of industrialization and urban growth, but the country was still emerging from its authoritarian past.
South Korea had lived through dictatorships after its founding in 1948, including military-backed governments that dominated national politics from the 1960s into the 1980s. The mass democracy movement of 1987 forced constitutional change and restored direct presidential elections for the first time since 1971, but civilian leadership did not return until 1993.
When I visited in 1996, South Korea was only a few years into that new political era. I was unaware of the gap between South Korea’s global image and the reality I encountered on the ground. This was still the early days of the Internet, when learning that kind of context usually meant reading a book, digging through newspapers and magazines, or speaking to a professor.
The city I encountered stood between two histories at once. No longer the ruined capital Kremer had photographed in 1954, but not yet the global megacity visible from the same mountain in 2026. That transformation appeared repeatedly in my travel journal entries.
Much of my time was spent examining Korean history through museums and historic sites. One observation focused on the recent demolition of the former Japanese Government-General Building, which had stood in front of Gyeongbokgung Palace.
Constructed during Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, the building remained a source of controversy long after liberation. Its removal in 1995 was widely viewed as an effort to restore the historical and symbolic landscape surrounding the palace.
The photograph of a modern 1996 skyline seemed incidental when compared to the historic sites I visited. It was simply one image among many made during a long stay in Seoul.
That image gained significance only years later. Historical photographs often survive because of what they intentionally document. But they can become equally valuable because of what they record unintentionally. Buildings, roads, hillsides, and landmarks preserved in the background can provide evidence of changes that the photographer never set out to capture.
Such a realization helped shape a return trip to South Korea in 2024, for the comprehensive series about Milwaukee’s Korean diaspora, Exploring Korea: Stories from Milwaukee to the DMZ and across a divided peninsula.
But I did not set out to match Kremer’s view from 70 years before, or include my 1996 version as a comparison. There were other goals and mandatories and, as it turned out, scheduling and weather conflicts. So in 2024, I was unable to return to N Seoul Tower.
By 2026, it was still not a mandatory on my editorial list. But when I finally did have time and did visit N Seoul Tower, I tried to approximate my 1996 photo because those landmarks were more visible. It was still a challenge with the clusters of tall buildings that obstructed the line of sight.
Unlike the tower observation deck, Kremer’s photograph appeared to have been taken farther down the mountain. Over the decades, vegetation had matured, trails had changed, and portions of the hillside that once offered clear sightlines had become obscured by trees.
I struggled to reproduce the view I had taken 30 years before from a known location. To recreate Kremer’s view with precision was physically impossible. But the effort was still close enough and valuable. The result was not perfect. In some respects, that imperfection tells its own story. Cities do not merely add new buildings. They alter the landscape from which they are viewed.
Viewed together, the three photographs taken in 1954, 1996, and 2026 reveal more than the growth of a skyline. They document three different moments in Seoul’s history. Kremer’s image records a city emerging from war. The 1996 photograph captures a capital that had become a modern economic powerhouse, but had not yet reached its full potential. The 2026 image reflects a mature global metropolis whose skyline extends far beyond what could have been imagined in previous decades.
Yet some elements remain constant. The mountains continue to frame the city as they have since ancient times. Namsan still rises above central Seoul. The geography that shaped the capital survives even as nearly everything built upon it has changed. It was all an unexpected lesson that came from a photograph that seemed the least important at the time it was taken.
What began as an effort to compare three photographs ultimately became an exercise in perspective. The images do not document Seoul’s transformation over seven decades. But they serve as historical markers to reference points in time.
They also illustrate how photographs acquire new meaning over time. Or that a popular viewpoint can become lost to either nature or progress. And when a city, observed across generations, can reveal how the act of looking at it changes as well.
