Guryong Village, photographed before the bulldozers arrive

April 2020. Eijiro Hamada saw amateur footage of Guryong Village on his phone. A maze of shanties in Seoul, built over decades by families who had nowhere else to go. The village sits in Gangnam, Korea's wealthiest district. No official maps mark it.

Hamada went three times between 2020 and 2024. The third trip was the last. Seoul announced demolition in late 2024. Residents were relocated. The structures came down in January.

The photos run now at Kyotographie, Kyoto's spring photo festival. Black and white, shot on medium format. Narrow alleys. Corrugated metal. Laundry lines. A television antenna tilted at 40 degrees. One frame shows a doorway with no door, just a curtain and a pair of shoes outside.

Hamada titled the series Rookery. The word means a dense colony, borrowed from ornithology. The village housed roughly 800 people at its peak. By the time he shot the final roll, fewer than 100 remained.

The photos don't argue. They document. A place that existed, then didn't. The kind of enclave that gets erased when a city decides it's done with informal settlements. Hamada filed the work as reportage, not as activism. He wasn't trying to stop the demolition. He was making a record before the record disappeared.

The show closes June 14. Fifty prints, wall-mounted, no captions. The village is gone. The photos remain.