North Korea

In April 2015, I traveled to North Korea to participate in the Pyongyang International Marathon.

We arrived from Shanghai in the middle of the night, on a Koryo Airlines flight chartered specially for marathon participants. Over the next three days we were shuttled from site to site, under the constant eye of our minders, and presumably, many more.

These images are by no means a comprehensive take on life in North Korea; they’re only a glimpse at the face North Korea puts on for visitors and the outside world. Many of these images are also, technically, illegal. Had they been discovered, they would have been forcibly deleted on the spot.

Shot on Canon 5DMK3. Many thanks to Hwajung Song for help translating the text in some of these images.