Limb Eung-sik's "Job Hunting" (1953) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh

A young man leans languidly against a marble wall on a city street, donning a bucket hat that covers half his face. The only clue to the story of this idle youth lies in a sign tied around his waist: "Looking for Work."

A struggling job seeker is hardly a new sight in any bustling metropolis, but what makes this black-and-white shot particularly striking is its backdrop: Myeong-dong, Seoul, in 1953. It's the same city battered by the 1950-53 Korean War that left an estimated 2.5 million civilians dead and much of the country in ruins.

Photographer Limb Eung-sik (1912-2001) is the pioneering documentarian behind what became the iconic snapshot of postwar Korea.

While he initially pursued a style of lyrical and aesthetic pictorialism as an amateur photographer during the 1910-45 Japanese colonial period, his perspective shifted after his experience as a war correspondent. In the 1950s, he embraced what he called "life-centered realism" — a candid approach to photography that, amid scenes of devastation, revealed the grit and resilience of people who found ways to live on.

Limb Eung-sik's "The Cathedral in the Midst of the Gunsmoke" (1950) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh

"A photographic work does not exist solely to express beauty. It must capture every aspect of life, whether sublime, ugly, or horrifying. All can, and must, be valid subjects for photography," he once remarked.

From over 80,000 negatives documenting mid-century Seoul and Busan, 43 prints from the 1930s to '50s are now on display at Gallery Yeh's new Changdeok Palace location in the exhibition, "Ars Photographica."

As a trailblazer in Korean photography, Limb holds numerous "firsts" in the field. In 1953, he was the first photographer invited to teach a course at Seoul National University's College of Fine Arts. Four years later, he brought the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) iconic exhibition, "The Family of Man," to Seoul's National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), the country's first major photography show that attracted over 300,000 visitors. And in 1982, he became the first photographer to hold a solo museum show at the MMCA.

Limb Eung-sik's "A Man Reading Newspaper" (1954) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh

At Gallery Yeh, Limb's penchant for everyday humanism shines through in his street images, where each subject reflects the multifaceted aftermath of colonialism and war and the spirited recovery of the once-destroyed city.

Without staging or interfering with the unfolding scenes, he pressed the shutter to immortalize fleeting moments of beauty in ordinary lives — from young girls balancing heaps of brilliant flowers on their heads in the Busan market ("Morning") to the striking contrast of a modern-dressed family in the foreground with gentlemen in traditional white "hanbok" and "gat" (horsehair hat) strolling along the Seoul river in the background ("Follow the Wind, Follow the Clouds").

Limb Eung-sik's "Morning" (1946) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh

Limb Eung-sik's "Follow the Wind, Follow the Clouds" (1959) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh

Other works reveal Limb's experimental spirit.

In "Naked Trees," he intentionally overexposed the image to evoke the ravages of war, capturing a lone boy standing among charred, skeletal trees. Yet by calling them "naked" rather than "withered" or "burnt," he suggests a glimmer of hope — that the boy will grow into adulthood, and the tree will one day sprout leaves again.

Limb Eung-sik's "Naked Trees" (1953) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh

In another series, he conveys the burst of emotions of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule through abstract imagery. With his camera destroyed in a bombing, he innovated with photographic paper and developing chemicals to create these pieces, a technique he named "Limsgram."

"In addition to his documentation of postwar Korea, we plan to spotlight Limb's various serialized projects in future exhibitions to offer a more comprehensive portrait of his work," said Kim Bang-eun, president of the gallery, during a press preview last week.

"These will include his abstract imagery, portraits of 20th-century Korean cultural icons like Kim Whanki, Chun Kyung-ja and Park Soo-keun, and a focus on the country's cultural heritage and classical architecture."

"Ars Photographica" runs through Jan. 24 next year at Gallery Yeh.

Limb Eung-sik's "Explosion" (1945) / Courtesy of Gallery Yeh