Glimmers of Everyday Life

A photo essay on North Korea (via):

Renowned documentary photographer Tomas van Houtryve entered North Korea by posing as a businessman looking to open a chocolate factory. Despite 24-hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people—images rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the West. They show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world’s last gulag.

 

[Photo: Tomas van Houtryve]

This is shopping in North Korea. The clerk sits in the dark, unheated special store, waiting to turn on the lights for foreigners, the only permitted customers. “She’s wearing a ski jacket or parka; the rest of this time they’re sitting there with the lights off, freezing,” van Houtryve says. The goods—toys, televisions, and the like—are imported from China. The store only accepts euros.

Comments

[EscapeVelocity]

North Korea, corporation free since 1952. Consumerism free workers paradise!

[tolkein]

When the regime finally (please) collapses, what will we find? What will the Korean people do when they discover that they've been prisoners in their own country without trial or guilt and nobody lifted a finger to set them free?

[EscapeVelocity]

Blame Westerners, no doubt, guided in that endevour by the Western Left.

[Edmund Standing]

Many thanks for posting this. Powerful stuff.

[fk]

Several websites have been created over the years by people [regular people] who have visited NK and come back with detailed accounts accompanied by many fine photographs. These efforts crush this sparse offering by this 'renowned' bigshot. pfft