Portrayals of North Korea tend to veer into extremes: either sensationalistic demonization on one side, or ungrounded idealization and staging on the other. Both portrayals manipulate and reframe public image and collective memory. With that they tend to erase the actual human beings who live there. This is why I wanted to build a project focusing on the group that forms the core of every society - people.
I was born in Yugoslavia, a formerly communist country that no longer exists. The first time I ever traveled abroad by myself was to Cuba, and after that I traveled around Russia. I've now lived in China for the last three years and my most recent photo project was shot in North Korea. Most people know these countries almost entirely as clichés. We only picture the people there as those on the wrong end of the rifle in Hollywood movies, or through short distillations of suffering and aggression in the back of newspapers. The further away the country is, in terms of both geography and culture, the greater the mistrust and misunderstanding of its people. The media's focus on the misdeeds and atrocities committed by North Korea's also ends up entirely obscuring the actual people who live there, until the only North Koreans we see in the newspapers are identical marching soldiers.
Portrayals of North Korea tend to veer into extremes: either sensationalistic demonisation on one side, or ungrounded idealisation and staging on the other. Both portrayals erase the actual human beings who live there. Instead of this, I wanted to build a project focusing on the group that forms the core of every society - people. People of different ages, statuses and occupations that anyone, anywhere could identify with. It seemed simple, but it quickly became clear why there aren't many similar projects around.
They're the people whom the world ignores because they neither fit into the domestic propaganda of a mighty and triumphant North Korea, nor into the international image of a country that can only be either castigated for its crimes or mocked for its poverty. Leaving this dichotomy entirely, all I seek to do is present the actual people I met in North Korea.