Men standing on the side of a highway running through the North Korean countryside. 2009

“Starving North Korea Send out SOS for Food Aid” is one of the headlines that reads on the Daily Telegraph’s website this week. This week also marks the birthday of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-Il. I have chosen to mark this day with a video that was released a few months ago on the Telegraph website, secretly recorded by North Koreans dissidents, in attempt to show some of the frightening conditions in the country. It’s disturbing to watch.

As readers of this blog will know, I travelled to North Korea in the autumn of 2009 on assignment for the Globe & Mail. We had a very limited view of the real North Korea. Our 5-day trip was state-controlled and we were whisked across the country from one official tourist destination to the next. When our private mini-bus passed though rural areas, we were expressly told not to take any photos. I, of course, tried to get some. One of which is below. It’s only a fleeting glance, however.

I had the opportunity to also travel to South Korea a number of times in 2010. The differences between the two countries are staggering. It troubles me when I read about North Korea and think of the conditions that the people of the country must live under. Having witnessed the modernity and prosperity of South Korea, I can only think, what if. What if North Koreans had a chance to be like their brothers and sisters in the South. North Korea is an enigma. Its leadership, a mystery.

N.B. If you are interested in learning more about North Korea, I highly recommend LA Times journalist, Barbara Demick’s book, ‘Nothing to Envy‘.

(Left) A CNN Newscast in a hotel room in Seoul, South Korea. (Right) An image of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il as a child appears on a television in a hotel in Pyongyang.

View gallery in full size

As anyone who has been watching the news in the past 24 hours will know, tensions on the Korean peninsula have been increasing very very quickly following the shelling of a small South Korean island, by the north Koreans yesterday. Tensions are nothing new, however after yesterday’s events it seems like attention is focused on the conflict more now than in many previous years.

(Left) A handgun from the Korean War in a museum on the South Korean side of the DMZ. (Right) A handgun is depicted during a dispaly at the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang, North Korea.

This seemed like a good time to release a short series that I have been playing with over the past few months, currently titled ‘Korean Reflections’. Readers of this blog and followers of my work will know that I have, relatively recently, had the chance to visit both North and South Korea. I travelled to North Korea in the autumn on 2009, as part of a 5-day undercover assignment for the Globe and Mail and this year I have visited South Korea three times, two times for corporate work and once for the Globe and Mail.

(Left) Two South Korean gentleman visit the DMZ on the South Korean side of the border. The DMZ serperates the two nations. (Right) On the opposite side of the DMZ, two North Korean soldiers.

During my trips and whilst spending time with my images, I started to see commonalities developing between the images from either side. At first, I notices small things, like a similarity between statues, or a flight of stairs. I then started to look for patterns further in the images and found quite a lot more. I have collected what I have found and placed the images which ‘reflect’ one another side-by-side, in order for you to see clearly the subtle similarities and stark differences between the two nations which are so close but at the same time, so far apart.

(Left) Two men waiting at a bus stop in Seoul, South Korea. (Right) People waiting at a bus stop in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Having been lucky enough to visit and photograph both of these countries, the differences between the two were the most striking aspect for me. South Korea is a modern and dynamic Asian country whilst North Korea seems to be stuck in what I can only think of as a time-warp. Both sides talk of reunification in the future however when seeing the incredible differences between the two nations, it is hard to imagine. Underneath the differences however both sides talk of being the same people. Inevitable similarities emerge from the images.

(Left) A man walks past a tree in central Seoul, South Korea. (Right) A man walks past a tree in the North Korean town of Kaesong.

I do not claim to be any kind of expert on Korea, or on the Korean people, history or politics. However, having had the opportunity to observe both, I hope the images can act as a small window into these two nations. View gallery in full size here.

Men watching the World Cup match between North Korea and Brazil in a bar in Seoul. 2010

It was about 2:00 a.m. as my taxi careered down the highway that leads from Incheon airport to downtown Seoul. Having just landed in the middle of a lightning storm, the rain was battering the taxi windshield and the GPS on the driver’s dashboard blinked indicating a breaking of the local speed limit. I was starting to wonder if it was really that essential that I make it to my 3:30 a.m. appointment on time.

That appointment was to watch and photograph the World Cup game between Brazil and North Korea. An odd appointment to be trying to keep you may think, especially for an Englishman based in Beijing. This however was the first part of a shoot I was assigned to for the Canadian newspaper the Globe & Mail which involved spending last week in South Korea.

Globe & Mail Website Screenshot

As many readers of this blog will know, last year I travelled undercover with the Globe & Mail’s Mark MacKinnon into North Korea to report on this isolated nation. During a fascinating 5 day trip I witnessed a country of such uniqueness, that I am quite confident I will never see anything quite like it again. This time however, I was heading south of the DMZ to try to gauge the reactions of locals in Seoul to the arrival of the neighbour on the World Cup scene.

In the build up to the game, nobody really knew anything about this team. Some people mocked them, expecting Brazil to embarrass the lowest-ranked team in the competition. Most people drew a blank when asked about them, in a similar way as if you asked them about the country in general.

At 3:30 a.m. we found ourselves in downtown Seoul searching for bars that were showing the game. It wasn’t easy at first. The few bars that had big screens seemed to be showing music videos rather than football. At that time of the night, young Koreans were packing the bars and some spilling out, making there way home at the end of a night out.

Hur Sung-Hun (centre), a restaurant owner in Seoul, watches the World Cup match between North Korea and Brazil. 2010

Eventually, we found a bar showing the game although interest didn’t appear to be high as only a smattering of people were paying attention. As I photographed and Mark spoke to people, it was clear that I was not going to get the crowd-reaction shot I was looking for. Instead I had to settle for quieter photos of the few supporters who were watching the game. After having talked to these people, it appeared there was support for the North Koreans although they were reluctant to express it too much, but it was definitely there.

Nothing To Envy | Barbara Demick

Amazingly, the North Koreans held out without any goals until half-time. As Brazil eased into a 2-0 lead however in the 2nd half, dropping heads reluctantly started to admit an onslaught might be imminent. It never came though. Conversely, North Korea scored, albeit in the 89th minute. A ripple of applause and delighted screams lept up from other bars near us proving that there were a lot of people who really did care about the North Korean team, even at 5:00 a.m. in the morning. By the end of the game, the North Koreans had battled valiantly and shocked the sporting world.

After visiting North Korea, I still don’t understand the country and having visited South Korea I am even more perplexed at how these two nations have evolved as polar opposites of oneanother. In an effort to try and understand more, I am currently reading Barbara Demick’s excellent book ‘Nothing to Envy‘, a look into the lives of people in North Korea told through the voices of ordinary citizens. So far (and I expect it to continue to be so) it is a really excellent read. To hear the voices of ordinary people in North Korea, is really quite extraordinary and is something we never were allowed to hear on our trip last year.

If you have an inkling of interest in North Korea, this should be one of the books you read first. We need more like this to start to truly understand this country and what has happened to her in the past decades.

The most popular post over the past 6 weeks has been the video that I shot and produced in North Korea, here. It’s been popular on my YouTube channel too, getting nearly 1000 views, as of today.

The most popular page on the blog has been the WEEKEND WORKSHOPS page, which is getting a lot of interest. We are just about to announce our workshops for January, so please stay tuned, they will be posted any day now!

Thanks again for stopping by. As you know, we’re on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube so stop by and see us there as well. Here’s to the next 6 months…at least!!!

YouTube

I haven’t announced this officially but I now have a YouTube channel! As I have started to produce more video work and multimedia over the past few months, I obviously want to get this work out to as many people as possible and YouTube seems to be the perfect venue as it is possible to upload multimedia content, even without video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN4gKiD9JyY[/youtube]

I currently have 5 entries on the channel; ‘Inside North Korea Parts 1, 2 and 3′, ‘China’s Growing Sands’ for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and ‘China’s 60th Anniversary Preparation in Hangzhou’, for the Globe and Mail. By far the most popular video so far has been Part 1 of Inside North Korea which has nearly 1,000 views. A modest amount.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BHVnG3m7BU[/youtube]

I have embedded a couple of the videos here on this blog entry but please go to the channel here to subscribe and have a look at some of the videos and spread the word to others who you feel may be interested in the work I am doing.

FOTOWEEK DC

If you are in the Washington DC area this week, then you should make a beeline for the wealth of photography events they on this week as part of FOTOWEEKDC. I am slightly miffed as I spent the best part of last week in DC and had to leave just before all the events kicked off. Oh well, these things happen, but I am happy as two of my images will be featuring in two different events during the FotoWeek.

The first image is one from my series on desertification in China and it will be in the David Alan Harvey Presents… exhibition. For details of where to find it, please go here. As many of you will already know, this image was featured on David’s Burn magazine a few months ago. I actually bumped into David just the other day when I was in New York. He was passing through on his way to FotoWeek, but we managed to grab a coffee in his apartment in ‘the Kibbutz’ in Brooklyn.  He had just come back the night before from a workshop in Mexico, was off to FotoWeek briefly and then was heading back to Mexico again for another workshop. I thought I had a busy schedule, but David takes it to another level!

David Alan Harvey Presents...Desertification in China

My second image in FotoWeek DC will be part of the Critical Exposure Auction. Critical Exposure is an organisation that promotes young people to use photography as a form of empowerment and provides opportunities for them to change their lives using photography. I was approached last month to donate a print (see image below) to their auction, which will be held on November 12th. More details here. If you are around Georgetown at that time, please head down to support them and maybe even bid for my print!

Critical Exposure Auction | North Korea

TIME Magazine Tearsheet | North Korea

It has been a whirlwind couple of weeks for me as I near the end of a 2-week trip to the US, which has involved talks at Universities, NGOs, an Emmy party, lots of meetings and pounding the streets of New York with my portfolio in hand.

So, when I checked my email the other day, I got a pleasant surprise when I learnt that one of my recently taken North Korea pictures was chosen to run in this week’s TIME Magazine. I haven’t had a picture in TIME before, so I am obviously very happy. It’s an image taken in Pyongyang, outside the mausoleum which houses the embalmed body of the former North Korean Leader, Kim Il-Sung. Technically he is still the leader, as he was given the title of ‘Eternal Leader’ upon his death, I believe. 

The issue with this photo runs tomorrow (or today, depending on your timezone). Go pick up a copy!

The Digitial Journalist

In case you missed it earlier this week, the Digital Journalist published a dispatch of mine in their October 2009 edition. The dispatch is titled “Inside North Korea” and recounts some of the experience that I had when I was shooting in North Korea. You can read the dispatch on their website here, or just scroll down to read the text below.

This isn’t the first time I have contributed dispatches to the Digital Journalist, having two other dispatches published for them in the past year. The first was published in December 2008, on the subject of homeless communities in Mongolia. You can view that story here. The second story on “Abandoned Cities” was published in June 2009, as part of my work for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting earlier this year. To read that dispatch, please go here.

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Last month, I got a call from the Globe & Mail‘s Asia correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, asking me if I was free in early September for a shoot. “Sure,” I said. I had been working with Mark a lot recently and was keen to work with him again. “I’m thinking of going to North Korea,” he said. “North Korea? Okay, I’m in,” I nonchalantly replied.

As our bus trundled across the bridge over the Yalu River that separates China and North Korea, my initial nonchalance had well and truly disappeared as we slowly approached the most closed nation on earth.

I was nervous because both Mark and I were posing as tourists, entering a country that was not exactly friendly to the foreign press. Immediately after the well-publicized rescue by former U.S. President Bill Clinton of journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who had been caught illegally entering the country, this was maybe not the best time to be trying to sneak into North Korea. With Mark’s passport indicating his journalist credentials hidden (replaced by one with no such indications) and my camera broken up into as many parts as possible and spread around my person, we actually didn’t raise too many eyebrows as we quietly slipped onto a bus packed with Chinese tourists.

I didn’t know what to expect before I entered the country. I had done my research, reading articles and looking at previously taken images; however, there was so little information available that I decided to just be as open as possible to what I saw, found and felt while in the country.

For the whole time we were there, our tour guide and government minder, both assigned to watch over us, accompanied Mark and me. I was initially very cautious about taking photos and capturing video footage of this little-seen place. As soon as we crossed the border, I started to reassemble my camera and tried to look as much like an inquisitive tourist as possible.

Our first stop was Sinuiju city, just across the border from China, where we visited a statue of the “eternal leader,” Kim Il-Sung (this was to be the first of many). As I took my first few tentative shots of the statue, all appeared well. No one was watching me and no one was telling me to stop. The pedestrians walking nearby, beyond the pristine park in which the statue was located, quickly caught my attention. As I turned to photograph them, I managed to take a few frames before my minder appeared from nowhere and firmly cautioned me to “please, only photograph the statue.”

That afternoon we took the train from the border to the capital, Pyongyang. I again got into a little trouble when I photographed a train station attendant, a no-no apparently, and when I tried to photograph outside the window of our moving train. Both times, I was sternly but politely reminded that it was not me who dictated who or what could be photographed.

I began to become paranoid that they would find out what Mark and I were doing there. Rumors from guidebooks and fellow travelers hinted that our hotel rooms were almost certainly bugged, although there was no way to tell for sure.

As we traveled around the country, our minder and guide constantly quizzed us, both obviously “assigned” to find out a little more about who we were and why we were visiting, searching for any holes they could find in our stories. A slip could have gotten us into serious trouble.

One day, we visited the International Friendship Exhibition, a huge exhibition of gifts including armored cars, various decorative guns, a polar bear skin and a stuffed crocodile. The international community had given them all to Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il as presents.

As we approached the small cabinet that held gifts from Britain, our museum guide turned to me and pointed out a decorative plate with a picture of London’s Tower Bridge on the front. “What do you think of this plate?” she casually asked. “It’s … er … very nice. That bridge is very famous in our country,” I replied. “When was it built?” she said suddenly. Her change in tone and fixing of eyes with mine quickly turned this situation into an obvious spot quiz. I started to regret dropping history classes at the earliest possible opportunity at school. “About a hundred years ago?” I haphazardly guessed, obviously not knowing the answer. “You don’t know!” she scoffed. “How can you not know? You just said it was very famous in your country!” I had failed the test miserably and to top it all off I was told later that I “didn’t even look British.” I was becoming more and more paranoid by the second.

Later, however, I seemed to redeem myself after I casually mentioned I liked science. This provided another spot-quiz opportunity for our guide. “What’s a vacuum?” she randomly blurted out. “I beg you pardon?” I asked, thinking I had misheard. “What’s a vacuum?” she repeated, slightly more seriously. “It’s a an area of space, with no air or matter in it.” A disappointed “hmph” was the only reply I heard to that question. Suspicion (of what exactly is unknown, in this circumstance) was relieved temporarily.

For the majority of our time in the country, Mark and I were separated from other travelers and even given our own 15-seater minivan that whisked us from site to site. After the first day or two, things started to change in our guides’ attitudes towards me photographing. Trying to pose as much like a tourist seemed to be paying off as they relaxed and rarely stopped me. I sat at the back of our minivan out of their vision and snapped away at the countryside that had been previously forbidden on the train. I seized upon their new attitude and boldly photographed away.

From our four days within the country, it was almost impossible to get close to the people to photograph. As much as I would have liked to, getting close to the everyday person proved to be almost impossible. Hence, my photographs from this journey have a sense of isolation about them. It is an isolation probably born from my own feelings while being there. People are dwarfed against the mighty, imposing communist-era architecture, small and insignificant against the overbearing size of the buildings.

For me, my images from this trip have raised more questions than answers. This isn’t a problem for me, but it does not help as much as I would like it to in offering answers in a photojournalistic sense. I hope that reading between the lines and peering through the cracks of these images, they will offer brief glimpses of life in this mysterious place and conjure clues for the viewer.

Traveling to North Korea was like stepping back in time to the Cold War. It’s a time that just doesn’t exist anywhere else on earth anymore. How long it will remain like this is truly an unknown.

© Sean Gallagher

Sean Gallagher is a British photographer currently based in China. Graduating in Zoology from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England in 2002, he subsequently changed career direction into photography. To date he has lived and worked across the world. His most recent work has specialized on social and environmental issues in Asia, with specific emphasis on China. This approach has resulted in receiving a travel grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (2009), being the first recipient of the David Alan Harvey Fund for Emerging Photographers (2008) and during 2004-2005 he was selected to undertake a one-year paid internship at the prestigious photojournalism agency Magnum Photos. His work has been published internationally in print and online and exhibited worldwide.

Contact Sean Gallagher and see more of his work at: http://www.gallagher-photo.com/main.php
Read updates on his blog at http://www.gallagher-photo.com/blog

Sean Gallagher’s previous dispatches:
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0812/gallagher-bp.html
www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0906/gallagher-bp.html

I just noticed today that I haven’t had a new post up for 10 days! Wow. I have been quite busy of late, having just got back from a shoot in the Chinese city of Hangzhou where I teamed up again with the Globe & Mail’s Mark Mackinnon for a new story. More on that to come in later posts.

A lot of my work appeared online in various blogs and magazines this week, which was great.

Burn Magazine Logo

On David Alan Harvey’s magazine, Burn, he published a short selection of my images that I took from the recent trip I took to North Korea. David edited these images himself actually, sequencing them also in the way he saw best fit. If you read the dialogue, he offers a few insights into how he went about this and his thoughts on editing. As this work is quite new to me, I was more than happy for David to help me create a voice for this work. To see what he came up with, go here.

Resolve Logo

Also, over on the liveBooks’ blog RESOLVE (for whom I am a regular contributor) my final post about some of my experiences photographing desertification for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, went up this week. If you missed some my earlier writings for RESOLVE, please go here, here and here to see them.

Duckrabbit Logo

Finally and by no means least, the excellent multimedia website duckrabbit featured a short highlight of some of my recent work focusing on both my desertification work and that in North Korea.

I can’t encourage you enough to go and check out all three of the above outlets. They are all very exciting venues for photography online at the moment.

This is the third and final installment of mine and Mark MacKinnon’s short videos from our trip in North Korea.

This third video focuses on the Chinese city of Dandong, which lies on the North Korea/China border and offers a startling contrast between the two sides of the Yalu river. Whilst the city of Dandong thrives, fuelled by the economic boom in many of China’s cities, the North Korean side is devoid of life, except for the odd fishing boat and abandoned building.

I hope you have enjoyed this set of three videos. In case you missed the other two, please find the first one “Inside North Korea” here and the second, “The Arirang Mass Games” here.