![]() What struck Gladieu from his time there was just how proud the citizens of North Korea are: “There’s a level of nationalism I have not seen before,” he remembers. “I thought it was powerful to use the iconography of propaganda because it was connecting the work to what portraits look like there, and it makes the images feel more understandable for the people there.” While shifting focus away from the heads of state, Gladieu’s photos emulate the traditions of North Korean portraiture by capturing ordinary people in a way usually reserved for the Kim dynasty. Planting rice in Sariwon collective farm, Sariwon, June 2018 Portraits of ordinary North Koreans largely exist for the purpose of social identification, and individual portraits of anyone but the great leaders happen rarely. ![]() This was, in many, ways “quite revolutionary”, he says. Gladieu found that the best way to work within these limits on his freedom was to create static, face-to-face portraits. “It meant that I wouldn’t be able to walk around in the streets and decide freely where I wanted to go.” Gladieu says he had to be “very, very clear” about what he proposed to do – and had to agree to have at least two or three North Korean guides with him from morning to evening. The photographs from his trips have recently been published in a book, titled North Korea (Actes Sud). After some lengthy convincing and negotiations surrounding which parts of the country he’d be allowed to enter, he finally managed to go to North Korea in 2017, making five trips over the following three years. I took a few weeks preparing for this meeting,” he recalls. “I thought a lot before I had a chance to earn an appointment in Paris with the North Korean delegation. Women pose in the ship restaurant uniform in front of Juche Tower, Pyongyang June 2018 Gladieu first attempted to visit 15 years ago, and was twice refused a visa. ![]() ![]() ![]() But North Korea posed an entirely different set of challenges for the photographer – not least when it came to gaining access to the country. “But when you look at what has happened in the media for decades, when we talk about North Korea, we talk about the dynasty, the leaders, the international relation problems, nuclear weapons… But when do we speak about North Koreans? Barely ever.”įor most of his career, Gladieu had worked as a war photographer across Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, and had experienced working under a dictatorship. “Everybody is fascinated by North Korea,” he says. Photographer Stephan Gladieu, who is based in Paris, went to North Korea to capture a different kind of portrait, turning his lens away from the heads of state, and onto the average citizen. In every home, office, school and every public place hang pictures of the Kim dynasty – Kim Jong–il, Kim Il–sung and Kim Jong-un – as an inescapable reminder of their power over the country since the DPRK was first established in 1948. In North Korea, there are millions of portraits of the state’s great leaders, constantly casting a watchful eye over the country’s citizens. Photographer Stephan Gladieu reflects on his trips to North Korea, where he set out to make a series of portraits peeling back the curtain on what life is like for the average DPRK citizen. ![]()
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