Photo Samples, North Korea

North Korea is a kind of a joke! Unfortunately to its present and future citizens, Kim Il Sung had to carry out his incredibly stupid social experiment on their home soil, and the result is a part-time high-tech country where everybody seems to work within agriculture, and where nobody can feed themselves. Every single inch of the country seems to be farm land, but still there is not food enough. Perhaps it has something to do with the extreme desire to keep up an incredible and very unproductive army? More than one million men are reported to be in the army instead of doing some kind of sensible work, such as industry. Or perhaps the reason is the eager building of extreme monuments to the glory of Kim Il Sung - who's still president despite the fact that he died in July 1994!

These and other paradoxes are just too evident to the visitor, however, any trip to The Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea must be done in a group, and with an official guide. This guide doesn't reaaly want to guide you, but he'll definitely make sure that you don't get to see things not meant for the western eye. Consequently, the opportunities for the photographer are rather poor, as he'll never let you lose on a market or just on a street. Instead, you have to see loads of "great monuments", and the rest of the photography have to be done by "cheating and hiding". They even control your photos upon departure, unless your camera possesses the highly recommendable "hide" function.

All photos are, of course © Claus Qvist Jessen, and none of them are to used without my permission. Abrochure onmy slide show on North Korea can be downloaded HERE.