Life inside the reclusive North Korean society has remained a mystery to the people outside. To many, the society poses a grim picture with horrific tales of labor camps and the totalitarian regime‘s surveillance of civilians, as told by defectors.
Only few foreign photographers have sought to look beyond those fragmented images and capture an unknown side of the society -- how life manages to go on in such isolation.
British photographer Nick Danziger is one of the few.
His 2013 journey to the hermit kingdom produced some 80 photographs of a variety of people from diverse walks of life. Some 34 of them are currently on display at Seoul Museum of Art until Sept. 29.
Women`s hair salon, Changgwang Health Complex (@ Nick Danziger / *NB Pictures for the British Council)
“I spent time very much on people, not about events,“ said Danziger in an interview during the opening of the “NK Project” exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art on July 21, recalling his North Korean trip. ”For me, what’s interesting is the people, sharing their lives, drinks they have.“
Danziger visited North Korea in 2013 on an official invitation from the communist state.
Together with writer Rory MacLean and director of visual arts at the British Council Andrea Rose, he traveled Pyongyang and three other cities -- Nampo, Sariwon and Wonsan -- for three weeks.
He captured a dancer during a practice session for the Arirang Games, North Korea’s gymnastics and artistic festival. He met women in a beauty salon with their hair rolled in pink hair perm rods and chatting with each other and men throwing a ball and playing on a beach.
His subjects also include farmers, children and babies. He took a picture of a newborn baby wrapped in a towel at Pyongyang Maternity Hospital and two grandchildren of a retired farmer studying at his house in a cooperative farm.
“When I approached to people, people always seemed to like it. For example, on a beach, people offered me food and drink,” said Danziger, who previously traveled conflict zones around the world such as Rwanda, Afghanistan, the West Bank, Myanmar and Ethiopia and took photographs of people and their daily lives.
Photographer Nick Danziger (@ Nick Danziger / *NB Pictures for the British Council)
He had been under the close scrutiny of his minders who always accompanied him in North Korea.
“First what they showed me was different from what I wanted to take. Every day I battled with them to take the photographs I wanted to take,” said Danziger.
But he was able to show the photographs without any screening by North Korean minders.
“I know it’s unusual, but hand on heart, they never looked at the photos except the one picture because I took it in a museum,” he said.
More photographs and stories of North Korean lives can be found in the exhibition catalogue “Above the Line.”
By Lee Woo-young (
wylee@heraldcorp.com)
