On 30 Rock a few weeks ago, a hilarious subplot featured comedian Margaret Cho playing North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il on the nation’s government TV network. The segments parodied the idealized version of reality the North Korean regime attempts to instill in its citizens, exemplified by a weather report in which Cho declared the forecast to be “everything sunny all the time always.” This satire of the North Korean propaganda machine is closer to reality than we’d like to think. Welcome to Pyongyang, a 2007 photography book by Charlie Crane, documents North Korea as seen through the eyes of those who rule it. He agreed to enter the country without his cell phone and accompanied by guards at all times, and the resulting photographs are carefully posed portraits of an eerily fake world. Their falsity shines through the overly perfect finish, making them ominous and unnerving. These pictures, which we recently spotted at Behance, radiate an uneasy feeling, one of tranquility coupled with fear. We can’t look away. Page through a gallery of the images that fascinated us most after the jump, then click over to Behance to see more.
Photo credit: Charlie Crane, from the series Welcome To Pyongyang
Comments (14)
This post is adorable and I think we have all felt that way often.Great resource!
white, sterile, stoic, robotic, empty, vast, emotionless, unnerving.
spooky, empty, invoking vast nothingness.
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משחקים
a transparent paradox – emptyness and strength
I feel like David Lynch might have taken these pics – calm and fearful.
Actually, these pics aren’t so creepy. If you switch out North Korea for any american suburb, clear out the frame of others, and take solo pics, it could be the US featured in these pics.
Definitely not gonna deny the creepiness of American suburbs.
@uptown……..just like the U.S.?!?!……..have you ever been to the U.S.?!?!
[...] I was examining all of these photos, I motivated myself to build my Korean [...]
They are like sims people. but with less personality. everything is so clean, they must all be ocd to polish every single speck off everything. makes me question perfection, it seems to lead to sterility.
Spooky…No one smiles but the Great One. The subway shot got me. De-void of people,. Then I spotted a few sole figures on the train. It looked like a faux model.
funny… most of the comments talk about emptiness…
we’re so used to all that crap surrounding us that we find these pictures ‘empty’… (by crap, i mean brands, trademarks, ®, ™, neons, programmed obsolescence shit…)
although on most of them, there’s a human being. which is everything but empty…
the subway (#10) and the dining hall (#12) look like a hybrid between the 1950′s america and the victorian era. the desk (#15) looks especially 50′s americana. The whole vide of these photos is very clean and sterile, composed and calm much like the aim and the portrayal of america in the 50′s and the victoria era.
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