"Everyday life photography" (saenghwalchuuˇ i sajin) has attracted attention, negative and positive, from a number of Korean historians of photography who have examined the genealogy of what has been ahistorically labelled Korean "documentary" photography. Some scholars have seen "everyday life photography" as the most significant development in the history of Korean "documentary" photography. More recently, however, "everyday life photography" has been criticized in comparison with late 1940s "social realist photography" (rioˇ llijuˇ m sajin) as avoiding social critique in the anti-communist climate of post civil war South Korea. My thesis challenges this assessment through an analysis of the discourse of "everyday life photography" and the photographic practice it sustained in South Korea during the 1950s and 1960s. I examine the cultural, artistic, and political conditions under which the conception of "everyday life photography" emerged and was promoted, analyzing the ways in which "everyday life" photographs related to Koreans' experience of "everyday life" (saenghwal) but also opened a space for social critique. "Everyday life photography" must therefore understood, I argue, not only in relation to the fears surrounding anti-communism but also in relation to the complex cultural and political conditions within which "everyday life photography" was able to reflect on postwar Korean society.