Beguiling Photos That Lift the Curtain on North Korea

NORTH KOREA: The People’s Paradise, by Tariq Zaidi

A woman pokes her head out from a hidden room at the Kumgangsan Hotel — a place known for hosting reunions between families from North and South Korea — disrupting the sweeping autumnal landscape painted on the wall.

The image, reproduced by Tariq Zaidi in NORTH KOREA: The People’s Paradise (Kehrer Verlag, 176 pp., $50), offers a metaphor for a country shrouded in secrecy. North Korea’s daily existence has been largely shielded from Western eyes;the state has halted nearly all tourism since it closed its borders early in the Covid-19 pandemic. Those who are granted entry are subject to extreme surveillance.

Zaidi, a self-taught photographer whose previous collection intimately documented the influence of gangs on life in El Salvador, was allowed rare access into North Korea under rigid conditions that included inflexible itineraries, final photo approval and the constant presence of state chaperones. Nevertheless, his images still manage to capture small, revelatory glimpses of daily life: a female traffic warden fiercely surveying the streets of Pyongyang in a crisp white uniform; a young girl perched at a weathered piano, studying crinkled pages of sheet music; several men casually sharing a picnic lunch on a rocky riverbank.

Throughout, Zaidi captures the omnipresence of the North Korean state. Order, discipline and juche — the state’s ideology of self-reliance — are emphasized in vibrant murals. The figures of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, the grandfather and father of the country’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, loom over classrooms, train cars and public squares, where the pavement is marked with foot placements to ensure perfect formation during processions.

Yet even within this imposed synchronicity and order, Zaidi’s lens offers evidence of deviation: a military man hiding a cigarette behind his back at the beach, a stiff knee disrupting the symmetry of a collective performance. These are tokens of imperfection, humanity made palpable. Here, too, each person is a small nation unto themselves.

NORTH KOREA: The People’s Paradise | By Tariq Zaidi | Kehrer Verlag | 176 pp. | $50