North Korea: dark images show snapshots of daily life in the closed world

It is always rare that the outside world has a glimpse of daily life in North Korea. The country only recently allowed Western tourists by following the COVVI-19 pandemic, and sometimes photographers find it difficult to go to certain places.

Last year, an AFP photographer captured rare images showing daily life in North Korea.

Pedro Pardo took photos of a far from the border of North Korea in the Chinese province of Jilin. The images offer a dark but fascinating look at life in a country wrapped in secrets.

Recent images that other photographers have taken in Pyongyang, the country’s capital, seem almost to be able to come from any city. They show people who walk in the streets or celebrate the new year, but there are often large panels displaying propaganda in the background.

North Korea was founded in 1948 under Kim Il Sung as a Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, inspired by strict Marxist-Leninist principles.

Its population of approximately 26 million people lives largely in isolation of the rest of the world in the austere communist state, prevented from going abroad without the authorization of the government and subject to media managed by the state which release the propaganda praising the nation and its supreme leader, Kim Jong one.

The self-imposed isolation of North Korea is largely because of its principal principle of “juche” or self-sufficiency, the idea that it should be able to function completely independently and remain separated from the rest of the world.

In practice, it failed to stifle the country’s economy and trade, and many of its citizens are faced with high levels of poverty and serious food shortages. The CIA says that the country “remains one of the most isolated in the world and one of the poorest in Asia”.

The Guardian reported last year that since the 1950s, around 31,000 North Koreans had sought to escape and defected in South Korea. The number jumped in 2023 in the middle of what the Ministry of Unification in Seoul called “the worsening of conditions in North Korea”.

The photos have a unique overview of these conditions and life in one of the last communist states in the world.