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1 Approaching and analysing
visual representation
The preceding chapter gave a glimpse of the importance of imaging in approaches

to North Korea. But why images? What makes them peculiar? What are their
characteristics and what might be problematic in engaging with them? What are
the differences – and the relationships – between pictures and words?
Before addressing these questions through an outline of the methodological
and theoretical propositions of this work, the specific guiding features of the cur-
rent general approach to images are outlined. It should be stressed that an analy-
sis of images does not spare the researcher from the need to scrutinize texts and
language as well. While visual representations are the main topic of research,
textual forms such as (sub)titles, captions and accompanying essays also have to
be included in the analysis. The discussion in the section ‘The politics of visual
representation’ will go into further detail on the relationship between images
and texts, but for now it is sufficient to note that the effect(s) and meaning(s) of
pictures are only created though the interplay between images and texts. This
epistemological view circumvents the privileging of one mode of representation
(for example, images above texts) over the other, and states that images unfold
their full force in conjunction with text and context. As visual culture scholar
W. J. T. Mitchell (2005: 257) has observed, all (visual) media are ‘mixed media’
in that they also depend on other communicating practices. That is to say, an
analysis of images always entails an analysis of texts. Second, it should also be
emphasized that it is not being suggested that the pictures examined here are
wrong, untrue or inaccurate. The analytical concern is not related to the com-
pleteness or truthfulness of these representations, but rather, as David Campbell
(2007a: 379) aptly formulates, to the ‘question of what they do, how they function,
and the impact of this operation’.
The following section discusses the previous approaches that have been dedi-
cated to questions of representation in the field of International Relations.
Aesthetics and IR
Over the last 10 to 15 years, there has been a growing interest in adopting insights
from architecture, art, film, literature, music, painting, photography and popular
culture as means by which to rethink and critically engage areas that are central
10 Approaching and analysing visual representation
to the discipline and its subject: war and peace, conflict and cooperation. This
increasing interest has prompted Roland Bleiker to speak, in 2001, of an actual
‘aesthetic turn’ in international political theory (Bleiker 2001). This turn towards
aesthetics coincides with the surge in the number of studies concerned with vis-
ual culture and visual rhetoric since the mid-1990s (cf. Hariman/Lucaites 2007;
see also, Elkins 2003; Evans/Hall 1999; Kress/van Leuwen 2006; Mirzoeff 1999;
Mitchell 1994).
That aesthetics can have an impact on, or themselves become part of (interna-
tional) politics, is shown by a brief look at two episodes that recently occurred in
East Asia. In December 2009, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade denied entry visas to five North Korean artists who had been commis-
sioned to exhibit their paintings at an art show in Queensland. The department
explained that the artists’ studio would produce ‘propaganda aimed at glorifying
and supporting the North Korean regime’, and further stated that the denial of visas
was part of its response to North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapons develop-
ment programme (Glionna 2009a). In the end, the paintings were exhibited, but
their creators’ entry forbidden (cf. Shim 2011).
Another example is the ban of instrumental music with titles allegedly praising
North Korea, which South Korea’s Supreme Court (as well as the government
and the military) said, in November 2010, would violate a domestic law known as
the National Security Act (Kim EJ 2010). What is interesting in this episode is
that a musical composition without lyrics – comprising 14 MP3 music files on a
USB storage device, for which its owner was sentenced to two years in jail –
came to be seen as a threat to national security. While both examples show
that censorship, restraint and intolerance are not only restricted to the usual sus-
pect, North Korea, they also offer glimpses of how allegedly apolitical pieces of
art can also be perceived as being tied to the larger questions of domestic and
international politics.
In contrast to mainstream theories of IR such as (neo)realism, (neo)liberalism
and constructivism – which mostly rely on official documents, interviews,
speeches, statements and statistics for their inquiry – aesthetic approaches also
draw on alternative sources – including movies, images and poetry – to provide
a different understanding of the realities, problems and conditions of world poli-
tics (Bleiker 2009; Danchev/Lisle 2009). The emerging interest in the relation-
ship between the political and the visual is reflected in an increasing number of
authors who (get) publish(ed) in special issues or sections of IR books, as well as
in edited volumes and journals – including Alternatives, Millennium, International
Political Sociology, International Studies Quarterly, Review of International
Studies and Security Dialogue. This body of work comprises a wide range of
interdisciplinary relationships and overlapping topics; some of the included
studies are:
• Visuality, representation and international politics (for example, Campbell

2007a; Debrix/Weber 2003; Dodds 2007; MacDonald 2006; MacDonald
et al. 2010; O’Loughlin 2010; Ó Tuathail 1996; Shim/Nabers 2012)
Approaching and analysing visual representation 11
• Aesthetic approaches and their relationship to the discipline of IR (for exam-
ple, Bleiker 2001, 2009; Danchev/Lisle 2009; Neumann 2001; Sylvester
2001, 2009)
• Aesthetics and global security (for example, Amoore 2007; Bleiker 2006;
Campbell 2003a, 2003b, 2011a; Der Derian 2001, 2009; Kennedy 2008,
2009; Möller 2007; Shapiro 1997; Weber 2006)
• Photography, atrocity and human suffering (for example, Bleiker/Kay 2007;
Campbell 2003c, 2004, 2011b; Dauphinée 2007; Laustsen 2008; Möller
2009, 2010)
• Visuality and securitization (for example, Campbell/Shapiro 2007; Hansen
2011; Williams 2003)
• Media, foreign policy and political intervention (for example, Dauber 2001;
Eisensee/Strömberg 2007; Gilboa 2005; Livingston/Eachus 1995; Perlmutter
1998, 2005; Robinson 1999, 2001)
• Aesthetic politics (for example, Ankersmit 1997; Shapiro 1988, 1999), and
• Identity, emotion, trauma and memory (for example, Bell 2010; Bleiker/
Hutchinson 2008; Crawford 2000; Edkins 2003; Mercer 2006; Ross 2006;
Shapiro 2008).
The examples show that examinations of the relationship between the issue of
representation, political practices and questions of global politics have prolifer-
ated significantly in the discipline of International Relations in recent years.
Also, IR monographs and teaching books increasingly use visuals specifically as
pedagogical tools to enhance their didactical and educational effects on students,
or to engage in questions of (visual) representation as a way to reflect on impor-
tant problems in international politics. Recent examples are: Roland Bleiker’s
(2009) Aesthetics and World Politics, Alex Danchev’s On Art and War and Terror
(2011), Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss’s (2009) Global Politics: A New
Introduction and Cynthia Weber’s (2009) International Relations Theory: A Critical
Introduction.
One of the effects of the inclusion of images – and of their use as pedagogy –
is the establishing of a connection between the visual dimension of global poli-
tics and the everyday. Weber, for instance, turns to popular films to rethink the
links between IR theory and the everyday lives of people. Conceived of as
narrative spaces of visual culture, popular cinematic representation allows us to
understand how – as Weber calls it – ‘IR myths’, which provide the truth condi-
tions for IR theories, become common and accepted IR beliefs. Above all, popu-
lar films can help to reveal ‘the everyday connections between “the popular” and
“the political”’ (Weber 2009: 9).
Instead of addressing the role of the visual in the everyday, as for instance Weber
does, this book, or at least a considerable part of it, engages instead with visuals of
the everyday and their linkages to the international and the political. In general,
the connection between the everyday and the political/international seems to
have in recent years received increasing attention in critical IR and geopolitical
thinking (see, for example, Blunt 2005; Enloe 2011; Gorman-Murray/Dowling
2007; Guillaume 2011; Pain/Smith 2008; Salter 2011; Schwartz/Ryan 2003). This
book conceives of images – whether photographs of everyday life or satellite
pictures – as a site of international political inquiry, thus providing a framework
by which to approach and understand international relations.
While in the case of satellite imagery, as is shown later, the geopolitical rele-
vance of vision and visuality appears obvious, because, for instance, satellite
images inform the decision-making processes of governments, intelligence agen-
cies and military authorities, this might not be the case at first sight with photog-
raphy of daily life. However, and in an attempt to add to the understanding of
conceiving of the international in terms of the everyday, it will be shown that
issues of daily life – that is, conditions of living, dwelling and being – carry sig-
nificant weight in governmental and non-governmental approaches to North
Korea. It is, therefore, important to ask how the outside world gets an idea of
North Korea’s everyday.
The analytical focus on aesthetic approaches is also shared by some subfields
of IR – including postcolonialism and critical geopolitics. Postcolonial studies
examine the ways in which ‘Western’ knowledge systems and moral concepts
have come to dominate (certain parts of) the world (Grovogui 2007; Loomba
1998; Said 1978; Sharpe 2009; Spivak 1988). They show how travellers’ tales,
exhibitions, novels, paintings and photographs have played an essential role
in European and North American imaginations about ‘Africa’, ‘Asia’, ‘Latin
America’ and the ‘Orient’. For instance, during the colonial expansions by
European states in the nineteenth century a growing number of photographers
accompanied troops and explorers from the major powers. They captured views
of foreign lands such as China, India, the Middle East and North Africa, which
stressed the exotic and mysterious appearance of the landscape, architecture
and people. In this way, photography helped to legitimize the colonial rule of
European states (Marien 2002: 103).
Critical geopolitics, also sometimes referred to as political geography, emerged
in the early 1990s, and attempts to bridge the disciplines of Geography and
International Relations (Power/Campbell 2010). Pioneering works by John
Agnew (1997), Simon Dalby (1990), Neil Smith (1991) and Gearoid Ó Tuathail
(1996) highlighted emerging questions about how notions of space, territoriality
and geopolitical orders are embedded in, and enacted through, specific linguistic
and visual practices such as cartography, satellite imagery and geographical
information systems (for the burgeoning literature on political geography, see
Albert et al. 2006; Agnew et al. 2003; Dodds 2007; Hughes 2007; MacDonald
2006; Rose 2003).
Clear distinctions between postcolonial studies, critical geopolitics and
aesthetic IR approaches are not easy to sustain – not least, since many critical
scholars such as David Campbell, James Der Derian, Roxanne Doty and Michael
Shapiro operate at the intersections of those fields. However, and at the risk of
gross oversimplification, a distinctive feature of critical geopolitics in contrast
to aesthetic IR approaches is its central concern with the organization and pro-
duction of (national) space, region and territory, while postcolonial studies
examine the politics of the externally-imposed constraints to self-determination
and self-representation. However, all approaches may have in common their ‘crit-
ical’ stance, in that they challenge established theories and practices of under-
standing local, regional and/or global phenomena (cf. Edkins/Vaughan-Williams
2009; see also, Cox 1981).
Critical approaches in IR are rooted in so-called postmodern or poststructuralist
thinking, which entered the field in the 1980s with the works of Richard Ashley
(1984), James Der Derian (1987), Michael Shapiro (1981; Der Derian/Shapiro
1989) and R. B. J. Walker (1987). Usually the terms ‘postmodernism’ and ‘post-
structuralism’ are used interchangeably in IR, although, as Campbell (2007b:
211–12) stresses, there are some differences between them. To determine the
specific characteristics of postmodernism and poststructuralism it is useful to
look briefly at the ideas and the values to which they actually refer: modernism
and structuralism.
Modernism is said to allude to a particular mindset related to European and
US societies, beginning from the late nineteenth continuing through to the mid-
twentieth century. Modernism emerged in an aesthetic context of architecture,
art, literature, music and painting, and is profoundly characterized by medical,
scientific and technological innovations during that period (Campbell 2007b: 211).
These transformations challenged everyday life conceptions about the way the
material world functioned and reflected the impact of these developments on the
political, economic and cultural order of what were now ‘modern’ societies
(Thompson 2004). Modernism can be conceived of more broadly as being an
epoch, one marked by specific developments that were related to changes in sci-
ence, technology and society – with postmodernism being a critical response to
these modern transformations.
In contrast, structuralism refers to a linguistic theory of meaning and is usually
associated with Swiss semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure. According to Saussure,
language has to be considered a system – or structure – of signs, which is deter-
mined by internal relationships between these signs and not through a pre-given
external reality. A sign is characterized by its form and content, which he calls
signifier (‘word’) and signified (‘concept’). The relationship of both is contingent
and arbitrary and the result of socio-historical conventions, whereby specific
meanings were attached to specific sounds. Important to note is that the meaning
of a sign is derived from its fixed structural position as it relates to other signs in
a language (Chandler 2007; Jorgensen/Phillips 2002). With the basic claim of
structuralist theory that people’s everyday activities are, like language, bound to
universal rules equivalent to syntax and grammar, it reveals a particular (scientific)
understanding through which these rules can be uncovered, mapped and com-
pared. Poststructuralists argue against the notion of language as a fixed structure
independent of context; they, in semiotic terms, contend that the meaning of
signs is affected by the particular context in which they are used, so that the
structure of language itself can be changed.
While postmodernism and poststructuralism draw on different historical con-
ditions of emergence, both, however, refer in IR to ‘critical’ standpoints, which
were mainly inspired by the thought of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and
Julia Kristeva (cf. Edkins/Vaughan-Williams 2009). The works of the above-
mentioned pioneers like Ashley, Shapiro and Walker in the 1980s were such a
response to the, at that time, dominant theories of realism and neorealism,
intended to demonstrate how their rationalist assumptions determined the condi-
tions, or more precisely confines, of speaking and writing about international
politics. By this time, the field of IR was (and to some measure continues to be –
see Smith 2000; Hagmann/Biersteker 2011) dominated by American theorists
such as Robert O. Keohane, John Mearsheimer, Joseph Nye and Kenneth Waltz
who developed and advanced rationalist theories and models of world politics:
neorealism and neoliberalism.
Contemporary IR studies on East Asian security relations are a good example
of the continuing efficacy and potency of rationalist models. Current research on
the so-called Six-Party Talks – a multilateral security forum consisting of
China, Japan, Russia, the two Koreas and the United States, that aims at the
de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula – focus mainly either on assessing its
potential, prospects and implications of institutionalization processes (for exam-
ple, Cerami 2005; Choi 2006; Choo 2005; Kim KS 2007; Park HJ 2007; Pritchard
2004), on analysing the roles, strategies and policies among the parties
(for example, Ashizawa 2006; Deng 2006; Joo SH 2004; Joo/Kwak 2007) or on
evaluating the results with regard to the compliance with the Six-Party agree-
ments and the likelihood of finding a solution for the various security concerns
(for example, Cotton 2007; Koh YH 2005; Park J. S. 2005).
While differing on the probability of there being cooperation among states due
to the anarchic order of the international system, something which is identified
by neorealists and neoliberalists alike as being the central organizing principle of
state-to-state relations, they do agree on a meta-theoretical level in that they
believe in the possibility of discovering an objective truth by the application of
scientific methods and value-free theories. A good example of this understand-
ing is an analogy to the famous Italian renaissance sculptor Michelangelo. Similar
to the artist’s claim that his sculpture David was always already present in the
stone and it only had to be freed, such positivist accounts assert that meaning and
truth lie intrinsically in the things themselves. Maintaining that the social sci-
ences in general, and IR in particular, can be investigated in the same way as the
natural sciences, positivist accounts attempt to verify or falsify facts, to test the-
ories and hypotheses through empirical measuring and postulate the existence of
universal cause–effect regularities which can be discovered – or, to put it in
Michelangelo’s terms, which simply have to be carved out from the political and
social world (Booth et al. 1996; Brown/Ainley 2009; Dunne et al. 2007).
Arguing against these assumptions are poststructuralist positions, which refute
the notion of a totalizing approach to international relations and outline how the
theoretical assumptions of rationalists have been elevated to the status of common
sense. They also challenge the starting point of mainstream rationalist theories,
by pointing out their historically contingent conditions of emergence. Among
others, postructuralists ask how these theories constructed and represented
knowledge of the world and how they tended to favour an explanation of the
international system that mirrored the interests of those who dominated the field
at the time. For instance, early radical scholars like Noam Chomsky have explored
the close links between the academic discipline of IR and state leaderships, par-
ticularly in the United States, and have highlighted how the dominant political
preferences of governments have helped one theoretical approach – like realism
in the 1960s and 1970s – to prevail over the others (Burchill/Linklater 2009: 15).
As a result of the critique of mainstream theorizing, a major debate occurred
in the 1990s between positivist and postpositivist perspectives in IR. Also known
as an exchange between rationalist and reflectivist positions – due to the now
famous address of Robert Keohane at the 1988 annual convention of the
International Studies Association – the epistemology and methodology of IR in
particular, as well as the nature and purpose of theory and theorizing in general,
were the central points of contention. Occasionally referred to as the ‘fourth great
debate’ of the field – after the divide between idealists and realists in the 1930s
and 1940s over the role of international institutions and their possible involvement
in the prevention of war, the controversy between realists and behaviourists in
the 1950s and 1960s over interpretive-hermeneutic and scientific methodologies
and the so-called inter-paradigm debate beginning in the 1970s among realists,
pluralists and Marxists over the problem of theory selection1 – important ques-
tions that emerged as a consequence of the dispute encompassed how reality ‘out
there’ can be known, what counts as knowledge and whether all knowledge-
producing theories are necessarily political because they establish narratives
of the world that privilege particular interests and marginalize others (Schmidt
2002; Smith 2007).
Since the late 1990s and early 2000s several authors have called for the field to
move beyond the positivism–postpositivism divide. Perhaps the most prominent
figure in this has been Alexander Wendt (1999), with his landmark publication
Social Theory of International Politics, wherein he attempted to occupy a middle
ground – the so-called via media – between rationalist and reflectivist positions
(see also, Adler 1997). However, Wendt has been criticized by theorists of another
emerging strand in the discipline, usually referred to as scientific realism or crit-
ical realism, for his continuing commitment to positivism and the fact that he has
remained within the basic framework of the actual debate (Kurki/Wight 2007).
They also took issue with what they said was his emphasis on ideational factors
as opposed to material factors.
Without going into too much further detail here, differences and similarities
between scientific realist and critical realist positions in the field are not always
clear cut, because their proponents – such as Milja Kurki, Jonathan Joseph,
Heikki Patomäki and Colin Wight who draw on the work of British philoso-
pher Roy Bhaskar – conceptualize the terms both differently and congruently
(cf. Brown 2007; Chernoff 2007). Usually, critical realism is referred to as a
form of scientific realism. Both approaches have in common their attempt to
engage the problem of the theoretical/philosophical incommensurability of the
preceding IR debates, their recognition of causal mechanisms in the social world
and their commitment to addressing meta-theoretical questions on the level of
ontology rather than epistemology, something which stood at the centre of the
fourth debate (Kurki 2007; Kurki/Wight 2007; Joseph 2007; Patomäki/Wight
2000; Wight 2007). Notwithstanding the virtue of critical realism – such as its
rejection of differentiation between positions of explaining and understanding –
poststructuralism serves as the book’s main (meta-)theoretical pillar, because
present research questions engage with practices of representation.
Putting the issue of representation and the problem of knowing on the research
agenda of the discipline are the central contributions of poststructuralist think-
ing (cf. Bleiker 2009: 31; see also, Campbell 2007b). Poststructuralism can best
be described as a view of the world that challenges the imperative of so-called
meta-narratives, which are universal explanations for events and developments
happening in the world (Edkins 2007: 88). Conceived of in this book as being a
form of critical thinking, poststructuralist perspectives, in general, question the
taken-for-granted.
Colours, or more precisely the way in which people construe them, are a good
example by which to show what is involved in contesting the natural. Colours
are also a good example because they later play a role in the discussion of (the
composition of) visual imagery. Typically, photographs are divided into two
categories in terms of colours: black and white photography and colour photog-
raphy. What is taken for granted in this conception is that black and white images
obviously do not belong to the category of colour images. Aside from the fact that
the meaning of the two genres is anyway constructed out of their (visual) contrast,
it follows that black and white appear to be outside of what can be conceived of
as colours, even though they are actually an integral part of the world of colours
(if not, what are they?).
Contesting notions of what counts as a colour also has political significance
if one thinks of the – truly globally spread – practice of differentiating and,
more serious, discriminating people based on their skin colour. Other examples
of the political dimension of colours include their relationship to the construction
of individual and collective identity. For instance, political affiliation to a politi-
cal party or ideology is often expressed through colours. In many countries green
is seen as a political position related to environmentalism, whereas red is usually
associated with left-wing political ideologies such as communism or socialism.
However, a ‘political theory of colours’ has also its variations as green is used in
many Islamic countries such as in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and
Saudi Arabia as a signifier for religious identification and not for political affili-
ation. Colours, displayed for instance in emblems, flags and uniforms of states
and international organizations, hence, have multifarious functions as they
help to construct differing ethnic, (inter)national, political, religious and social
identities.
One of poststructuralism’s central assertions is that knowledge claims per-
taining to the world, reality or truth are tightly bound to power and politics.
Knowledge is not immune from the influence of time, place and perspectives but
is itself an expression of particular constructions and representations in discourses.
All knowledge is contingent upon certain power relations and political contexts
and is the result of competing knowledge representations (Devetak 2009).
Because claims of possessing the ultimate knowledge and truth have often
resulted in violent outbursts in human history and international relations – for
example, the medieval crusades that occurred in the eleventh to thirteenth
centuries, the colonial expansion of European states from the fifteenth to the
twentieth centuries and the recent ‘democratization wars’ in Afghanistan and
Iraq – poststructuralist approaches also address ethical concerns in that they
seek to include those voices that have been hitherto excluded by the dominant
mainstream theories.
The issue of representation is particularly suitable for illustrating the differences
between what can be called traditional and non-traditional approaches in IR. The
starting point for these non-traditional positions is the assumption that truth,
reality and the world are only accessible through discourse. A discourse refers to
a ‘specific series of representations and practices through which meanings are
produced, identities constituted, social relations established, and political and
ethical outcomes made more or less possible’ (Campbell 2007b: 216). We make
sense of the world by referring to these systems of representation. They enable us
to understand, describe and define the world which, in turn, affects who we are.
According to this position, meaning does not lie inherently within things, actions
or ideas as traditional (positivist) theories would claim. The ‘true’ essence or
‘real’ meaning of a phenomenon cannot be represented in its full complexity and
remains completely unknowable outside of the discourse, which makes it mean-
ingful. As Said (1978: 21, italics in original) notes in this respect, ‘there is no
such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation’.
Practices of representation – language, images, signs, texts – are, hence, never
transparent or complete reflections of an objective truth or a material reality, but
are meaning-generating mediators, which are what constitute truth and reality in
the first place (Shapiro 1981).
Epistemologically, it follows from this that representations become constitu-
tive of what is being represented – with the effect that we are only able to know
things by virtue of their representation (Ankersmit 1996; Laclau 2005). As a
consequence, meaning, truth or politics do not exist prior to, or independent
from, their discursive representation (cf. Bially Mattern 2005; Howarth 2000;
Hansen 2006). Because we create meaning out of the world through practices of
representation, they imply relations of power: what is represented and how and
who decides what deserves representation? This approach to discourse and rep-
resentation has to be understood in relational, instead of referential, causal or
essentialist terms, since an event and its representation are mutually constituted.
In this vein, representations do not cause certain actions, but are rather interre-
lated and ‘discursively linked’ (Hansen 2006: 28; see also, Dunn 2006). However,
this epistemological assumption does not deny the significance of material facts
or the existence of an objective external reality. Ontologically, a material object
or an external event still exists independent of thought, yet it cannot acquire
meaning by mere self-reference; rather, it is only achieved through discursive
articulation, which, for instance, can turn a stone into either a means of aggres-
sion or an object of contemplation (Laclau/Mouffe 1990: 100–3).
Transferred to the context of contemporary international relations in East
Asia, the sinking of a South Korean naval ship in March 2010, which a multina-
tional investigation team concluded was caused by a North Korean torpedo, does
not tell us whether this incident constitutes an act of war or an act of terrorism, or
whether it is an issue of bilateral, regional and/or global significance. The nature
of this event cannot be ascertained by its mere occurrence or the presentation of
such facts as photographs and TV footage of ship wreckages and torpedo frag-
ments. As Foucault (1984: 127) famously noted, ‘we must not imagine that the
world turns towards us a legible face which we would have only to decipher; the
world is not the accomplice of our knowledge; there is no prediscursive provi-
dence which disposes the world in our favour’. Facts do not speak for themselves,
but have to be represented in terms, which, to come back to the case of the South
Korean-led investigation, determine that the sinking of a ship violates the 1953
Armistice Agreement between China, North Korea and the United Nations
Command and constitutes a threat to international peace and security. The appoint-
ment of an investigative commission led by the United Nations Command to
specify the nature of this incident – whether the attack was a violation of the
armistice that ended the Korean War or not – points to the indispensability of
interpretation in the articulation of danger (Campbell 1998).
Many studies in IR that employ an explicitly poststructuralist approach are
missing a clear discussion of visual forms of representation. Usually they limit
their analytical focus exclusively to spoken language and written texts even
though, as one prominent discourse theorist has proclaimed, discourse ‘is not
restricted to speech and writing but embraces all systems of signification’ (Laclau
2006: 106). Some examples are such early seminal works as Writing Security
by David Campbell (1992) or Imperial Encounters by Roxanne Doty (1996).
More recent publications in this mould are Charlotte Epstein’s The Power of
Words in International Relations (2008), Lene Hansen’s Security as Practice
(2006) and Debbie Lisle’s The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing
(2006; others such works include: Diez 2001; Herschinger 2011; Malmvig 2011;
Milliken 1999).
This is not in any way to diminish the important contributions of these authors to
critical scholarship, not least because some of these authors, above all Campbell,
in their later works have shaped the ways in which IR inquiries – including this
one – approach the issues and implications of visual representation. In addition,
their being referenced here in this way is not meant to constitute an attempt to
elevate visual-based studies above language-based analyses. An important claim
that is made repeatedly in this book is that an analysis of images always also
entails an analysis of text (and context). Yet, discourse should not be seen as
language in a restricted sense, but rather as something that also comprises other
forms of representation. As such, a thorough discussion of the politics of images,
as in this book, is not only necessary but also consistent in terms of advancing
critical international studies.
Doty’s and Epstein’s monographs are good examples of how images are fre-
quently (mis)treated or overlooked in discourse-based IR studies. They both show
why the inclusion of images is of fundamental importance for critical analysis. In
her much remarked upon examination of the relations between the so-called
Global North and South, Doty (1996) examines how the ‘Third World’ was rep-
resented – or better, narrated – by policy-makers, scholars, journalists and travel
writers of the ‘First World’. Doty focuses on specific moments of contact – in her
words ‘imperial encounters’ – between Anglo-Saxon (United States and Britain)
and African/Asian countries (Kenya, the Philippines), which were characterized
by asymmetrical power relations. She shows how in speeches and written texts –
such as parliamentary debates, policy documents and travel reports – the colo-
nized countries were denied effective agency which, in turn, legitimized the rule
and order of the colonial powers.
What is striking, and in particular for what can be classified as a postcolonial
study, is that visual materials are entirely absent in her otherwise well-researched
analysis. This is all the more surprising given that one of the merits of postcolo-
nial thinking is to show how colonial/colonized subjects – one of Doty’s central
objects of inquiry – have been produced by practices of looking in particular
(see, for instance, Lidschi 1997; Said 1978; Sharp 2009). Paintings, photographs,
museums, exhibitions and maps were as central to colonial discourse as the
speeches, writings and narrations of the colonizers were. To scrutinize the link
between visuality and subjectivity, one is moved here to ask a crucial question
prompted by a critical reading of Doty’s monograph: what was the nature of these
imperial encounters? Were they only verbal, or also visual? For while notions
of, for instance, a ‘white man’, ‘black Africa’ or ‘dark continent’ with regard to
(colonial) representations of ‘Africa’ certainly proliferated because of verbal
(and written) descriptions, they also did so due to visual depictions (cf. Campbell/
Power 2010; Ryan 1997).2
Epstein’s monograph (2008) is a more intriguing example of how, bluntly put,
some critical scholars miss the forest for the trees. Her book The Power of Words
in International Relations examines competing discourses on saving and killing
whales, at the international level, and how the former prevailed over the latter. In
contrast to Doty’s book, Epstein’s monograph does at least feature some visual
figures. For instance, she includes a caricature of a Japanese whaler in order to
show the persistence of the contemporary anti-whaling discourse (ibid. 172).
However, used in this way, the image merely serves as an illustration for her own
argument. The image itself is not subject to critical inquiry.
Furthermore, in her efforts to examine the anti-whaling discourse she turns to
a 1974 whaling boycott advertisement created by a coalition of US environmental
groups that was published in several major US newspapers (ibid. 170–2). The
advertisement, one of the central objects of the book’s discourse analysis, is dis-
cussed in depth. Epstein carves out an argument about how the advertisement,
through the use of particular predicates, constructs differing – that is, opposing –
subject positions between what she calls ‘them-whalers’ and ‘us-anti-whaling
activists’ (ibid. 175). However, in her interesting discourse/predicate analysis, in
which she meticulously traces the effects and patterns of usage of a particular
language, Epstein, surprisingly, does not include – or even mention – the actual
large image that is also included in the advertisement. Taking up one-third of the
full-page advert, the picture shows two whales in close proximity to each other,
of which one is larger than the other. Through the positioning of the whales in the
image – the larger one is placed slightly above the smaller whale – it can be
inferred that the larger whale is female while the smaller one is her calf. This
strategic spatial placing of the two whales – in conjunction with the advertise-
ment’s heading, which reads ‘SAVE THE WHALES!’ – gives rise to the interpre-
tation that the larger whale is not only accompanying the smaller one but indeed
is actually protecting it as well. Important to note in this regard – a key point that
Epstein misses in her otherwise fine discussion – is what the image visually con-
veys: an emotive mother–child relationship.
The omission or overlooking of the visuality–subjectivity link is particularly
remarkable because questions of subjectivity and identity are central to Epstein’s
approach to the analysis of the advertisement. This is not to diminish her book
which includes, among other things, a useful and detailed discussion concerning
the role and function of text-based synecdoches, a theme that is also considered
and refined in the present work. But, to put it simply, the omission is a major
shortcoming – not least because her analysis is precisely about discourses of
saving whales. In other words, who else would be worthy of protection if not
a mother and her child? In this vein, the image is an integral part of the anti-
whaling discourse that Epstein has otherwise analysed thoroughly. Moreover,
this discourse becomes, at least partly, genderized as a result of the visual repre-
sentation of a mother–child relationship.
The inclusion of a discussion of images can thus clearly benefit academic anal-
yses in IR (and beyond). To reiterate one of the main tenets of this book, address-
ing and questioning what we see and how we (are made to) see are genuine – and
moreover obligatory – aspects of critical visual inquiry. Asking about the condi-
tions of visibility means taking into consideration that how and what we see is
not a mere coincidence but serves very particular purposes. The boycott adver-
tisement could have been designed differently, thereby inviting alternative ways
of seeing and, more importantly, knowing – by leaving out the depiction of
whales altogether or by including or emphasizing other aspects visually. Vision
and visuality are, hence, essential objects of critical scholarship.
Of the works that have explicitly addressed the politics of visual representation,
many have focused on ‘familiar’ (US-related) topics: the ‘War on Terror’ (for
example, Amoore 2007; Dodds 2007), the war in Iraq (for example, Debrix 2006;
Gregory 2010; Kennedy 2009), the war in Afghanistan (for example, Campbell
2011a; Heck/Schlag 2012), prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (for example, Butler
2009; Carrabine 2011), the military prison at Guantánamo (for example, Van Veeren
2011) and ‘9/11’ itself (for example, Chouliaraki 2004; Bleiker 2003).
Engagements, particularly book-length ones, with the subject of North Korea –
and ones that discuss its representation in visual discourse – are currently virtually
non-existent within this field of study. This negligence is all the more stunning
given that there are few states like North Korea in the international relations
arena. As mentioned in the introduction, the country continues to be made mean-
ingful in terms of the political and the international: regardless of whether it is
the oft-quoted fragile state of its economy, food situation or political system –
with a total collapse always pending – or its so-called diplomacy of coercion and
nuclear brinkmanship, North Korea continuously affects the state and stability of
both regional and global politics.
Similar to the case of many international actors being involved in Afghanistan,
North Korea is international politics because of its repercussions on the interna-
tional political realm. This book – the first of its kind – addresses what is missing
in visual-based studies in IR, and thus contributes to the burgeoning of diver-
sity in this field of research. It complements some sparse, though significant,
pre-existing works on North Korea, specifically those crafted from a critical IR
perspective.
The only critical scholar to have worked extensively on both areas of research –
that is, aesthetics in IR and North Korea – is Roland Bleiker, who also spent two
years in a Swiss diplomatic mission at Panmunjom, an abandoned village in the
demilitarized zone located on the inter-Korean border where the armistice agree-
ment was signed (for example, Bleiker 2009, 2006, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2001).
However, while Bleiker in his Korea-related works reflects, for instance, on the role
of poems in articulating Korean identity or on the ways in which what he calls a
‘culture of reconciliation’ would contribute to the overcoming of recurring Cold
War patterns of conflict on the Korean peninsula (in particular in his monograph
Divided Korea; Bleiker 2005), he has not – in contrast to this book – linked his
broad visual research to North Korea thus far. In his widely-recognized work
Aesthetics and World Politics, Bleiker (2009) explicitly opts for a language-based
approach to urge his readers to reflect more on one form of aesthetically-informed
engagement with international politics: poetry. While Bleiker’s contribution mainly
consists of what aesthetic articulations – in this case poems – have to say about world
politics, not least to look for alternative solutions to global problems, the present
book looks at aesthetic outputs – in this case images – as parts of world politics.
Referencing Bleiker in this way is not to suggest that visual-based research on
North Korea does not exist. It certainly does, but mostly – and in contrast to this
book’s direction – in the form of studies that examine the (internal) visual per-
spectives of North Korean officials in, for instance, the domains of art, film,
theatre and architecture (see, for example, Frank 2011; Kim SY 2010; Meuser
2011; Myers 2010; Portal 2005). As will be outlined in more detail in the section
‘Which images and whose representations?’, this book’s objects of analysis are,
rather, what will be called external visual representations of North Korea, and
hence not its official (internal) self-representation(s). Suffice to say here, that it
is important to distinguish between both visual perspectives – an internal official
and an external unofficial one – because of their ability (or inability) to function
as legitimate sources of knowledge.
However, some recent article-length studies have focused on that external per-
spective; either in the form of US media coverage of North Korea (for example,
Gusterson 2008) or in the form of an analysis of North Korea images in South
Korean popular culture (for example, Epstein 2009). However, what they lack –
perhaps unintentionally – is a clear discussion of the international political
dimensions of vision and visuality.
One well-known critical scholar, François Debrix (1999: chapter 2), has
engaged, at least partially, in the discussion about the visual dimension of global
politics, through the example of the controversy about North Korea’s nuclear
programme in the 1990s.3 In Debrix’s Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping, the chapter
‘Space Quest’ deals with satellite images, which are construed by the author as
being instances of global surveillance and governance in international relations.
In particular, he identifies the United Nations as the primary agent of what he
calls ‘panoptic surveillance practices’. Part of the chapter is devoted to the visual
surveillance of North Korea through satellite technology.
Debrix describes accurately the importance of seeing and visualizing in matters
related to North Korea’s nuclear programme. For instance, in the early 1990s, the
IAEA placed closed-circuit television cameras at the country’s different nuclear
sites, in order to monitor Pyongyang’s compliance with the Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT). Footage from these cameras would be periodically examined by the
international inspectors. In addition to these remotely-controlled observation prac-
tices, the IAEA also conducted onsite inspections of suspected nuclear sites – with
the inspectors demanding visual access to the facilities in question.
Another means of visual surveillance, and one which receives Debrix’s main
analytical attention, is remote sensing. Satellite imagery is often the only way to
gather knowledge about particular issues when, as in the case of North Korea,
monitoring cameras are removed and/or international inspectors are expelled. As
Debrix (1999: 68) notes, ‘what could no longer be accessed by means of onsite
inspections or cameras was nonetheless still made partially visible by means of
[satellite] surveillance techniques’.
Debrix, by referring as well to other authors, uses the example of satellite
observation of North Korea (and of Iraq) to suggest that questions of interna-
tional politics can be addressed and governed through the disciplining effect of
visual surveillance conducted by the United Nations (ibid. 83). Panopticism –
commonly associated with the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who built
on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas of a prison scheme, known as ‘panopticon’, and
which essentially refers to the principle of visual dissymmetry (to see without
being seen) – is identified as the central mode of governance through which
discipline is achieved.
Simply, panopticism and surveillance performed by appropriate institutions

can achieve governance as a practice of governmentality, and lead human-
kind to its desirable liberal apogee (to govern: to steer, to drive) in the
absence of a central power (but with the realized and/or simulated presence
of a central warden). This view on global governance is consistent with the
phenomenon of UN panopticism [of North Korea and Iraq] in the 1990s.
(ibid. 93)
This reference to Debrix is not intended to either verify or falsify whether his
articulations concerning the possible role of the United Nations in global affairs –
as what he calls a ‘super-Panopticon’ – are warranted or not – not least because it
is all too easy to know the ‘answer’ better in hindsight. What is important is to
draw attention to what has been overlooked in his otherwise thorough inquiry:
that is, the question of what is at stake with the practice of mediated vision –
as this particular context genuinely constitutes a re-presentation, given that the
UN/IAEA were provided with satellite images of North Korea’s nuclear sites by
US intelligence agencies. This neglect is a little bit surprising, as even Debrix
himself mentions that (in)sight on the part of the UN/IAEA was only enabled by
means of the CIA’s help (ibid. 68).
As indicated in the introduction, addressing the issue of mediated vision –
which includes asking what do others want us to see?, what are we allowed to
see? and why do others want us to see (only) particular images? – is of central
importance when discussing the (geo)political implications of visual imagery.
These questions will be addressed in detail in the chapter ‘Seeing from above:
satellite imagery and North Korea’. As such, it is suffice here to note that, in
Debrix’s case of the UN as the principal agent or executioner of satellite surveil-
lance practices, one actor – the IAEA – was completely dependent for its ability
to act and make decisions on the visual benevolence of another (the United
States/CIA). In other words, agency is only possible to the extent that someone
else has granted vision. This is crucial to note because, for Debrix, the United
Nations are the acting agent in what he calls the ‘new global surveillance/
governance order’ (ibid. 72).
The case of the early 1990s shows that mediated (satellite) vision has deep
geopolitical ramifications, as a range of diplomatic activities – the IAEA’s
demand for a special inspection of the suspected nuclear facilities in North Korea,
the activation of the UN Security Council, the threat to impose economic sanc-
tions, the general deterioration of the regional security situation – were all triggered
as a result of selective practices of looking. Against this backdrop, it thus becomes
imperative to acknowledge and address the question of visuality – how we are
made to see – in critical international studies.4
The theoretical focus of this book can be summed up in a nutshell: the study is
not about the representation of politics but about representation and its politics
(cf. Hutcheon 1989). It acknowledges that all forms of representation are always
anchored within particular frameworks and values and serve particular purposes.
Because representation is inevitably grounded in certain relations of power, it is,
as some would say, deeply ideological (for example, Louis Althusser); or – as is
preferred here – political.
The politics of visual representation

Visual representation seems to be crucial in our times of increasing intercon-
nectedness across time and space, because images play a key role in mediating
events and developments to distant audiences (Campbell 2007b: 220; see also,
Moeller 1999; Postman 1987). Much of contemporary global politics has a visual
dimension to it: various political actors – including national governments, inter-
national institutions, non-governmental organizations and civil-society groups –
rely on, and resort to, visual imagery as a way to communicate and represent
certain types of knowledges, policies and events (Johnson 2011). A recent exam-
ple of the importance of vision for the performance of political action is the
Communication and Visibility Manual of the European Commission’s humani-
tarian aid agency, EuropeAid (EC 2009). Introduced in 2009, the manual sets out
the compulsory rules, guidelines and requirements for all activities – that is,
‘briefings, written material, press conferences, presentations, invitations, signs,
commemorative plaques and all other tools’ (EC 2009: 5) – that are used to high-
light EU participation abroad, with the aim of covering the visual identity of the
EU and giving instruction on how its external activities are to be represented.
While similar guidelines were, for instance, jointly established by the United
Nations and the European Commission (UN–EC 2008) and other UN-related
institutions (cf. UNDEF 2007), these examples highlight how the course of
political action has become tied to its visual representation: visual imagery is
integral for the planning, execution and representation of politics.
Imagery can enact powerful effects, since political actors are almost always
pressed to take action when confronted with images of atrocity and human suf-
fering resultant from wars, famines and natural disasters. Usually, humanitarian
emergencies are conveyed through media representations, which indicate the
important role of images in producing emergency situations as (global) events
(Benthall 1993; Campbell 2003b; Lisle 2009; Moeller 1999; Postman 1987).
Debbie Lisle (2009: 148) maintains that, ‘we see that the objects, issues and
events we usually study [. . .] do not even exist without the media [. . .] to express
them’. As a consequence, visual images have political and ethical consequences
as a result of their role in shaping private and public ways of seeing (Bleiker/Kay
2007). This is because how people come to know, think about and respond to
developments in the world is deeply entangled with how these developments are
made visible to them.
Visual representations participate in the processes of how people situate them-
selves in space and time, because seeing involves accumulating and ordering
information in order to be able to construct knowledge of people, places and
events. For example, the remembrance of such events as the Vietnam War, the
terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 or the torture in Abu Ghraib prison cannot
be separated from the ways in which these events have been represented in films,
TV and photography (Bleiker 2009; Campbell/Shapiro 2007; Möller 2007). The
visibility of these events can help to set the conditions for specific forms of polit-
ical action. The current war in Afghanistan serves as an example of this. Another
is the nexus of hunger images and relief operations. Vision and visuality thus
become part and parcel of political dynamics, also revealing the ethical dimen-
sion of imagery, as it affects the ways in which people interact with each other.
However, particular representations do not automatically lead to particular
responses as, for instance, proponents of the so-called ‘CNN effect’ would argue
(for an overview of the debates among academic, media and policy-making
circles on the ‘CNN effect’, see Gilboa 2005; see also, Dauber 2001; Eisensee/
Strömberg 2007; Livingston/Eachus 1995; O’Loughlin 2010; Perlmutter 1998,
2005; Robinson 1999, 2001). There is no causal relationship between a specific
image and a political intervention, in which a dependent variable (the image)
would explain the outcome of an independent one (the act). David Perlmutter
(1998: 1), for instance, explicitly challenges, as he calls it, the ‘visual determinism’
of images, which dominates political and public opinion. Referring to findings
based on public surveys, he argues that the formation of opinions by individuals
depends not on images but on their idiosyncratic predispositions and values
(see also, Domke et al. 2002; Perlmutter 2005).
Yet, it should also be noted that visuals function as unquestioned referents in
international politics when underlining the necessity of such specific policy prac-
tices as sanctions, deterrents and/or military cooperation. A good example of this
is satellite imagery, which plays a pivotal role in the surveillance and assessment
of missile or nuclear proliferation activities by so-called ‘rogue states’ like Iran
and North Korea. Regarded as providing compelling evidence about the stage of
development of nuclear facilities or about the collaboration between suspect
states, satellite images point to a nexus between visuality, knowledge and inter-
national politics wherein this way of seeing consequently enables governments to
make legitimate statements, draw conclusions and take informed political
action. In sum, the visual provides the foundation for knowledge generation and,
in doing so, bestows political responses with legitimacy (cf. Möller 2007). A now
famous case-in-point is Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation at the United
Nations Security Council in February 2003. In the briefing, the then US Secretary
of State showed satellite images that allegedly proved the existence of Iraqi
‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’. What was remarkable about Powell’s presenta-
tion was that the visual emerged as the primary referent for the US government’s
casus belli, which, in the words of MacDonald et al. (2010: 7–8), disclosed the
fact that the ‘logic of geopolitical reason is now inseparable from its visual rep-
resentation’ (see also, Campbell 2007c; Der Derian 2001).
The causal theory of the ‘CNN effect’, or what Perlmutter (1998: 1) has called
above ‘visual determinism’, misconceives of how the visual recasts the political
realm itself (Hansen 2011). Rather than asking whether an image caused an inter-
vention, it should be asked instead how the visual has been involved in structur-
ing the understandings of legitimate action, and how visual representations of
different policy options affect particular security practices (Williams 2003: 527).
For instance, many scholars have shown that images can provoke particularly
emotive responses (Bleiker/Hutchison 2008; Crawford 2000; Hariman/Lucaites
2007; Mercer 2006; Ross 2006). Just one example of the (deliberate) evocation of
an emotional reaction is the numerous fundraising campaigns that have been run
by different humanitarian aid organizations over the years, in which imagery
plays an essential role (Bell/Carens 2004; Dogra 2007; Manzo 2008).
As mentioned above, images work; they do something by evoking a particular
perspective about what is shown in them, while allowing only specific kinds of
seeing. By relating the viewer and the viewed in ways that determine who or what
is both visible and invisible, images create boundaries and differences which, in
turn, affect who ‘we’ and ‘they’ are. A depiction is not just a neutral representation,
it is the venue for the construction of social difference (Fyfe and Law 1988: 1).
To understand the effect of an image it is, therefore, necessary to delineate its
mechanisms – termed in this book the logic of inclusion and exclusion.
In the case of North Korea, photographs have a direct impact on their viewers
as they make them no longer just observers; they are turned into the position of
witnesses – either of the dangerousness and belligerence of the North Korean
leadership or of the forlornness and despair of the North Korean people.
Why are photographs (assumed to be) special?

Similar to positivist claims to scientific objectivity, authenticity and neutrality,
photography likewise promises to have the same inherent qualities. Interestingly,
the invention and development of photography correlated with the advent of the
positivist conception of science in early nineteenth-century Europe.
A photograph has peculiar features, as it (seemingly) provides unmediated
access to reality. Conceived of in terms of positivism, a photograph establishes an
empirical truth through visual evidence and presents us with an objective-scien-
tific tool for witnessing the world as it is, and not as we wish it to be. This ability
points to a quality of representation that scholars term reflective (Hall 1997),
mimetic (Bleiker 2009) or documentary (Hamilton 1997), and which implies the
possibility of being able to see the unvarnished truth with one’s own eyes (see
also, Sontag 2005; Tagg 1988).
The belief in a congruent representation of reality is due to the photograph’s
capacity of functioning, as Roland Barthes (1977: 17, italics removed) famously
noted, as a ‘message without a code’, which makes it, in contrast to other modes
of representation – such as drawings and paintings – a ‘perfect analogon’. Because
of its style and appearance, a painting or a drawing is easily recognizable as an
artistic, and hence artificial, representation of the real, while a photographic
depiction appears to be the exact copy of its referent (Neumann 1988; Sekula
1989; Sontag 2005). With regard to the differences between photographs and
television footage, Susan Sontag (2005: 13) contends that single pictures might
be better remembered than moving images, because they are ‘a neat slice of time,
not a flow’. By contrast, television footage would be easier to forget as each of the
moving images is cancelling out its predecessor.
Photographs have the capacity to provoke reflection. Images of war, atrocity
and human suffering, perhaps in recent years most visibly in the pictures of
torture at Abu Ghraib prison, almost demand a response and the taking of deci-
sive action. Because images are believed to have a particular effect on their view-
ers, something which can be referred to as the immediacy of pictures, photographs
figure prominently when political and ethical responses are targeted. Alongside
the aforementioned advertising practices by aid agencies, another example of
the impact of images on their viewers is the visual health warnings printed on
cigarette packets. Proponents of this method expect that the display of graphic
images of smoking-related diseases and their effects on various body organs will
bring about changes in the behaviour or attitude of consumers. An indication of
the efficacy of this approach is the study conducted by US-based researchers that
found that health warnings accompanied by photographs are better remembered
than text-only references are (Strasser et al. 2012). The (feared) impact of visual
health warnings is also one of the reasons why tobacco growers and cigarette
companies throughout the world fiercely oppose the inclusion of such graphic
warning labels.5
The image seems to contain special features that make it have its own distinct
category of meaning. This can be seen in the domain of intellectual property
rights, which differentiates between the image and the word. While words and
passages in a text can be cited in, for example, an academic publication like this one
without the author needing to pay licence fees, this is not the case with images.
The distinctiveness of the image in relation to the word (or the tone) is mani-
fested, for instance, in there being diverse national and international copyright
collectives who are each – and separately – responsible for the rights manage-
ment of images, music and texts.
What is another peculiar feature of a photograph is its comparative immunity
to the loss of authority, value and symbolic character if its staged nature is
disclosed. For instance, if a painting turns out to be fake it may immediately lose
its monetary value and social meaning. However, the disclosure of the staging
and enhancing of a photograph does not necessarily undermine its efficacy,
as many examples in the history of photography and photo-journalism illustrate:
be it the raising of the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima,
the street photography by Robert Doisneau or the iconic picture of the falling
soldier taken by Robert Capa (Campbell 2003b; Hamilton 1997; Hariman/
Lucaites 2007; Perlmutter 1998; Roth 2009), all of which were later revealed as
having been staged in one way or another. In fact, some cases reveal that the
manipulation and montage of images can explicitly be lauded and rewarded, as
the exhibitions of montage artists Peter Kennard (‘Uncertified Documents’) and
Alexander Rodchenko (‘Revolution in Photography’) in London, in 2008, show
(Lubbock 2008).
A basic characteristic of an image is the lack of an exclusive signifying structure
similar to syntax and grammar, which written or spoken language must adhere to
in order to be comprehended (Brothers 1997: 18). Therefore, and unlike in the case
of languages, images can be ‘read’ by all people regardless of origin, sex or age.
A good example of this is the pictograms and other graphic symbols that we com-
monly encounter in our daily routines. Frequently witnessed without texts and
words, pictograms visually convey meaning in the form of, for instance, guidance,
instructions and warnings. Because they are easily accessible, they are used
throughout the world – in the case of the above-mentioned graphic warning labels
on cigarette packets, they have been employed in countries as diverse as Australia,
Brazil, Canada, Chile, Hong Kong, India, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the
United States.
Images can be distinguished by their ability to depict complex circumstances
simultaneously and at one point in time, while textual forms rather provide
accounts that are consecutive in nature. One of the consequences of the peculiar-
ity of images is the challenges that they pose for visual methodological approaches
(for more on methodological questions, see the section ‘How can images be dis-
cussed’). A good example that illustrates these challenges is the retrieval of
images in the internet, which mainly focuses on the question of how to select and
find the right picture. While the search for text-based data in the internet is easy
and efficient – as a result of the application of sophisticated software and compu-
tational power which looks for grammar, lexis and linguistic and written syntax –
it is not so straightforward when one is looking for images, because, as Martin
Warnke (2009: 33) notes, ‘they clearly lack clarity’, which would otherwise facil-
itate their retrieval.6 Defying the parameters that bring about the right findings
from text-based searches, images seem to evade rigorous discovery and, hence,
scrutiny. Interestingly, because software fails to recognize the content of an
image, it relies on accompanying texts and captions (‘tags’) in order to deliver the
most appropriate results (Dambeck 2011). This is a first indication of the intricate
relationship between images and texts, elaborated on in detail below.
What is the problem with photographs?

The perception of photographs as providing objective, authentic and neutral
glimpses of the real is not an unproblematic one. As with all representations,
the decisions and selections that affect the basic quality of the photograph – its
aesthetic character – are always subjective (Bleiker 2009: 7). The correctness of
photographic depictions is not questioned in this regard. Rather, the point is to
call attention to the fact that specific representations depend on a particular
understanding of who or what is worthy of representation.
The choice to depict someone or something is neither objective nor neutral,
since it is already an interpretive act (Butler 2009; Tagg 1988). In this vein, the
depiction of something like, for instance, ‘real’ life in North Korea is not initially
a copy of the real, as many observers would contend, but rather a reflection of the
photographer’s own interest and prejudices. In this vein, a photograph is an act of
visual imagination. Hence, the taking of a picture is as revealing of the photogra-
pher as it is of the subject depicted (Banta/Hinsley 1986: 20; Brothers 1997: 25).
As a consequence, photographic representations of daily life in North Korea
can be seen as responses to how ‘real’ life is imagined by the producers of those
images, because photographing cannot be separated from the photographers’
construal of reality. In other words, similar to what can be termed ‘believing is
seeing’, the external imaginations of what is going on in North Korea affect how
certain issues and developments are represented or expected to look like. A good
example to cite in this regard is the remarks of Orville Schell, who wrote the
foreword to a North Korea photo book entitled The Last Paradise, compiled by
Swiss photographer Nicolas Righetti (2003). Described by the volume as ‘one of
the world’s leading Asia experts’, Schell recounts his own experiences from when
he accompanied Righetti on his journey to North Korea. Deploring the fact that
they were denied the opportunity to see the ‘real’ North Korea by their guides
(‘upon completing our tours, most of us have left with a sensation of having been
somehow cheated – of having been to a place that was so managed that its true
reality remained almost completely unrevealed to us’), Schell gives an account of
what he expected to be North Korea’s ‘true reality’: ‘if you journey to North
Korea, you will see nothing of the “real life” of this benighted land; namely, no
starving peasants, no nuclear weapons sites, and no political prisons’ (Schell
2003). Indicating a link between representation and imagination, Schell’s remarks
imply that it is only when starving people in North Korea can be observed that life
in the country can be said to be and feel real.
Often photographers, especially those operating within the genre of docu-
mentary photography, are believed to be neutral observers recording, without
influencing, the things that they depict. However, photographers cannot be con-
sidered neutral in the sense that they are able to document from an outside, quasi-
extra-discursive, point of view an environment, without having any impact on it;
the behaviour of people changes as soon as they become aware of the lens of a
camera. Examples that are discussed in Chapter 3, ‘Seeing on the ground: every-
day photography and North Korea’ underscore this view. When faced with a
camera people begin to react to or interact with it: they smile, pose, gaze, ignore
or turn their faces away from it. In other words, the presence of the photographer
and the practice of picture-taking affect the actions of the people depicted, some-
thing which reveals photography’s ability to intervene in the social reality of
people and which illustrates the material consequences of seeing and represent-
ing (cf. Poole 1997). It should also be added that documentary photography, like
any other photographic genre, is an aesthetic style, and one which has its own
subjective norms and conventions.
The revelation of the difference between the represented (reality) and its repre-
sentation (images) has been aptly captured by Belgian painter René Magritte,
with his painting This is not a Pipe. Magritte’s art highlights what is at stake in
the process of representation, by calling into question the seemingly ‘natural’
relationship between reality (the pipe) and its mimetic representation (the drawing
of the pipe). By pointing out that visuals are representations of reality and not
actually reality itself, Magritte gives indications of the functions and effects of
the interplay between an image (the painting), words (‘This is not a Pipe’) and
their material referent (the pipe) in the production of meaning (cf. Jay 2008: 55;
Sturken/Cartwright 2001: 15). Because an image cannot be reduced to the mere
representation that it depicts – it does not say what its meaning or effect is – it has
to be interpreted in order for sense to be made of it. The reading of an image in
this way draws on wider contextual aspects and refers, for instance, to what
Barthes (1977) has called ‘the connoted message of images’.
What should also be added is that photographers or photo-journalists might not
determine autonomously which of their pictures will be published, but rather it is
decided partly or wholly by the publishers’ editorial departments. After the choice
of the photographer over what and how to depict particular things or people, the
decision by the editors about what and how to publish marks photo-journalism
with an additional subjective dimension. The selective character of what or who
deserves representation also has a political dimension due to the photograph’s
logic of inclusion and exclusion or, as Sontag (2003: 46) aptly noted, ‘to photo-
graph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude’. A photographic picture determines
both what kinds of objects and subjects can be seen and how they are made visi-
ble, since the viewer cannot look beyond what the photograph(er) allows him or
her to see (Clarke 1997: 22).
For example, with regard to photographic representations of AIDS in Africa,
Bleiker and Kay (2007) have noted that some pictures of human suffering show
exclusively decontextualized miseries, in which the depicted subjects are
abstracted from their original (local) context. The photographs are taken from a
specific perspective, leaving out certain cultural or societal features and showing
only desolate, passive victims who are marked by their agony. This kind of
photography – that is, the exposure of individuals mostly in the form of photo-
graphic close-ups – is characterized by what Shapiro (1988: 129) has called a
‘personal code’, denoting the potential depoliticizing effects of photography. The
personal code translates into an exclusion or reduction of a given complexity,
which can lead to an oversimplified view on intricate social or political issues. For
instance, images with an iconic status – mostly taken as photographic close-ups –
such as the starving African child provide an interpretive frame of reference,
which reduces heterogeneous political processes into a single homogenizing
depiction and enables the reading of the situation to proceed in the same way as is
shown in the image. Chapters 2 to 4 give a more detailed account of photography’s
logic of inclusion and exclusion, and discuss the implications of what remains
inside or outside of a picture’s frame.
However, since no visual representation can provide a perfect resemblance –
that is, give a complete account of what ‘really’ happened – all photographs have
to be considered reductive, transmitting only parts of the whole (Clarke 1997;
Jakobson 1956). This pars pro toto representation points to the rhetorical trope of
synecdoche and describes the signifying process of making a reference to the
whole through a partial account. A synecdoche is itself a representational practice
as something comes to stand for – it represents – something else. A synecdoche can
be conveyed verbally (for example, ‘roof’ for ‘house’) or visually (see Figure 2.1).
It can also serve as an analytical method by which to examine how images con-
vey meaning; that is, how they function in a particular way. A distinct function
of synecdochic representations – which offer a slice of life – is that, according to
Daniel Chandler (2007: 133), ‘the world outside the frame is carrying on in the
same manner as the world depicted within it’. These transferring effects should
be kept in mind when discussing photographs and the relationship between the
facilitation of effective actions and synecdochic representations.
The viewer of the image is, hence, invited to supply a concluding interpreta-
tion concerning the depicted situation. This enthymemic function is crucial in
mobilizing and facilitating action in, for instance, humanitarian emergencies,
due to the synecdoche’s establishing of a causal link between the (well-being
of the) part and the (well-being of the) whole. In other words, synecdochic repre-
sentations increase the incentive to act – for instance, by donating relief supplies
or deploying aid workers – because anything done to the part is assumed to affect
the whole (Epstein 2008: 112). In semiotic terms, the synecdoche ties the signi-
fier (part) essentially to the signified (whole) and, hence, points to a distinct
ontological function: the part becomes constitutive of the being’s whole. Or, as
Chandler (2007: 133) concludes, ‘[t]hat which is seen as forming part of a larger
whole to which it refers is connected existentially to what is signified – as an
integral part of its being’ (see also, Laclau 2005: 72). Synecdochic representa-
tions imply a modification of what is depicted since any attempt to capture reality
involves selections and reductions which are transformative of what is shown in
them. While essentially all photographs can be understood as involving synec-
doches (since they represent a part of reality), specific images reveal a double
synecdochic effect due to the interplay between image and accompanying text
and title. Some examples of these appear in the discussion in Chapter 3.
The concept of synecdoche is rarely given sufficient analytical attention in
critical international studies. A positive exception is Epstein’s (2008) monograph
The Power of Words in International Relations, discussed above, where the con-
cept of synecdoche is analysed thoroughly and effectively. However, Epstein
conceptualizes synecdochic representation instead as existing on the level of
linguistics. This book shows how visual synecdoche can also be utilized for a
rigorous discussion about the politics and ethics of images.
Another problematic feature of photographs concerns the (im)possibility of
images actually speaking for themselves. Because this issue alludes to the
relationship between images and texts, it will also be addressed in more detail
below.
What is the relationship between images and texts?

In common parlance, it is almost de rigueur to say that a picture is worth a thou-
sand words. Visual culture theorist W. J. T. Mitchell (1994: Chapter 5) claims that
images are superior to words in their explanatory capacity. Referring to the ques-
tion of how to give a verbal description of a visual representation he notes that,
No amount of description [. . .] adds up to a depiction. A verbal representa-

tion cannot represent – that is, make present – its object in the same way a
visual representation can. It may refer to an object, describe it, invoke it, but
it can never bring its visual presence before us in a way that pictures do.
Words can ‘cite,’ but never ‘sight’ their objects.
(ibid. 152)
The centrality of images in everyday life, which as noted has been called ocu-
larcentrism by Martin Jay, reveals the power relations among particular modes of
representation, according to which a single picture is accredited as being more
meaningful than a bundle of texts – or tones, if one thinks, for instance, of the
common practice in courts of law of privileging eyewitnesses over earwitnesses,
because vision is given more credit and credibility in testimonies. However, crit-
ics argue that imagery has always been important throughout history, and to all
societies, and raise the objection that claims about the increasing importance of
the visual are based in rather Eurocentric discussions (Rose 2001: 8–9; see also,
Levin 1993). In addition, vision is not always the measure of all things if one
takes the example of UFO sightings. Contrary to the widespread conviction that
‘seeing is believing’, people who have spotted so-called unidentified flying
objects are usually sneered at, their sightings dismissed as mere delusions. What
this shows is that vision is not an extra-discursive mode of representation that
enables it, almost on its own, to speak the truth or tell of reality; rather, it is, like
the other human senses, subject to particular contexts and discursive frame-
works that typically permit ways of seeing to be esteemed as the superior means
of perception.
Regardless of determining whether a single image is more powerful than a
specific amount of words, this discussion has at its centre the question of whether
an image can speak for itself; or, to put it slightly differently, of whether images
are reliant on texts for their comprehension. A good way to envision the relation-
ship between images and words is the example of visual dictionaries, which,
similar to the standard practice in (photo-)journalism, utilize pictures in order to
explain the meaning of words. While these kinds of catalogues, such as The
Visual Dictionary of Merriam-Webster, subordinate the image to the word –
because the former is meant to serve the latter, and not vice versa – they also
show, albeit unintentionally, that an image only comes to have meaning in
conjunction with words.
Barthes has a similar take; he states that there has been a historical turnaround
in the connotation processes with the emergence of press photography. As he put it,
‘formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the
image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination’ (Barthes 1977: 26).7
While he refers to the hierarchical character of the relationship between the
image and the word, he points particularly to the meaning-guiding function of
texts: captions contextualize, prioritize or even add particular aspects to the
image, so that it is read in a specific or new way. Sontag (2003) agrees, by stating
that photographs cannot provide interpretations by themselves – that is, without
texts. An image would require captions, which then channel its interpretation.
Caroline Brothers (1997: 28) notes that images are read differently pursuant to
individual experience and do not possess a single meaning. Headings, captions,
associated texts, the character of the publication itself and depictions encoun-
tered elsewhere all help to determine a specific reading. She concludes that it is
the common attitudes to which an image refers through accompanying texts that
determine how an image is to be understood.
The argument that pictures almost by nature have a specific meaning can be
frequently encountered in the case of so-called iconic photographs. Pictures with
an iconic status belong to a relatively small group of images that, as Robert
Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (2007: 6) put it, ‘stand out from all others
over time’. Such famous photos or footage as the Chinese man confronting tanks
near Tiananmen Square or the Vietnamese girl fleeing from a napalm attack are
deemed to be historically meaningful, emotionally reverberating and symboli-
cally compelling. Due to their wide circulation and timeless nature, iconic images
become themselves part of a collective memory or public culture (Brink 2000;
Hariman 2007; Perlmutter 1998). Hariman and Lucaites (2007), with their book
No Caption Needed, suggest that certain images attain a special status that makes
them easily accessible to a broad audience, so that iconic images – without
making references to other signifying elements such as text or context – limit the
range of possible interpretations that are available to the reader.
In a similar vein is the argument of Judith Butler (2009: 66), who explicitly
criticizes Sontag’s argument that a photograph cannot by itself offer an interpre-
tation and relies, therefore, on captions and written analysis for its comprehension.
Butler refers to the attempts of the US Department of Defense to regulate the
public visibility of recent and current wars. She mentions the reporting practice
of ‘embedded journalism’, like in the war in Iraq, whereby military and govern-
mental authorities permitted journalists to report solely from the official per-
spective, showing only preselected images of military action. As she notes, ‘these
reporters were offered access to the war only on the condition that their gaze
remain restricted to the established parameters of designated action’ (Butler
2009: 64). Other examples of the strategies used by official authorities to define
ways of seeing are the engagements by ministries and military branches of, for
instance, the governments of the Germany, Israel or the United Kingdom on
internet platforms such as Youtube or Flickr. These efforts not only reveal that
the visual itself is being credited with a significant role in shaping public ways of
seeing; the use of visual means by states around the world to form their public
image also shows that government-sanctioned videos and photographs commu-
nicate certain knowledges, ones which conflate a political endeavour with its
visual representation.
With regard to the war in Iraq, Butler stresses that the visual framework that
has been provided by US governmental agencies has structured the reading of
images in advance. In other words, images that are produced within this frame-
work do not need to have captions or narrative explanations attached to them
in order to be understood. As Butler concludes, the ‘regulation of perspective
thus suggests that the frame can conduct certain kinds of interpretations’ (Butler
2009: 66).
The attempt by governmental authorities to define the visual field can also be
found to be active in the case of North Korea. Typically, all foreigners who enter
the country as tourists, aid workers or researchers are assigned, when doing ‘out-
door activities’, a North Korean counterpart who has to be consulted before the
taking of pictures or recording of films. This necessity for permission reveals the
attempts of the North Korean government to control what is shown in images
and, hence, indicates how the visual itself is being politicized on the part of the
country’s authorities. However, the case of North Korea provides an important
counter-example to Butler’s finding about the war in Iraq. A visual frame that is
provided by state authorities is not able to structure the interpretation of images
in advance: North Korea’s visual perspective is continuously reinterpreted or
restructured by the outside world, leading to readings and meanings that perhaps
differ from what was originally intended by the country’s officials. It is no coin-
cidence that the political leadership of North Korea, often through the state news
agency Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), regularly issues statements that
express criticism about the way its actions and policies have been portrayed and
interpreted by outside forces. In sum, what can be concluded from the discussion
above is that, on the one hand, images might be more (and more) significant than
words in everyday life, but, on the other, that words can govern or facilitate the
interpretation – and hence the comprehension – of these images. Knowledge is
often mediated through different modes of representation, including the verbal,
the visual and other kinds of senses. Last but not least, the interplay between
images and texts gives an initial clue about how photographs can be approached
methodologically.
How can images be discussed?

Visual analysis seems to entail a core ‘problem’: if there is no single or correct
answer to the questions of what does this image mean, or how do we explore its
effects, then how can a methodological toolbox be developed in order to carve out
its meaning and function? How do we discuss pictures if there is never one
right way to comprehend them? In contrast to other signs such as numbers –
which can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided in order to make them
comprehensible – or written and spoken texts – which are embedded in grammati-
cal and syntagmatic regularities – images seem to defy specific rules and close
scrutiny. However, several authors argue that images contain a ‘visual grammar’
that gives clues about how they might be approached and comprehended
(for example, Kress/van Leeuwen 2006; Rose 2001; Weber 2008).
Considering images as empirical documents in their own right implies adopting
what Gillian Rose (2001) has called a ‘critical visual methodology’. Accordingly,
this approach entails not only taking images seriously but also thinking about
their uses, as well as reflecting upon one’s own way of looking at them (Rose
2001: 15–16). In short, in discussing and understanding the functions of images
a number of questions are raised that address the formal composition of visual
images, their context of (re)production as well as their relationship to other signs
(see also, Bleiker/Kay 2007; Clarke 1997; Cosgrove 1994; Hamilton 1997; Kress/
van Leeuwen 2006; Rose 2001). It should be stressed that the distinctions between
the following categories are not clear cut, and overlap in some respects.
Concerning the composition of an image, guiding questions to be asked
include: what is shown in the image? How are the components of the image
arranged? How are objects and persons positioned in relation to each other and in
relation to the viewer? And, what is happening in the image and what are the
depicted people doing? For example, the elements within an image might be organ-
ized in ways that enable the transference of specific qualities from one component
to another. This practice of meaning transference is applied, for instance, in the
advertising arena (Rose 2001: 83; Williamson 1978). It is important to note that such
transfers can be made so persuasively that certain elements become the objective
correlations – their qualitative signifiers – for other components. In the end, sub-
jects depicted in an image appear to have certain inherent qualities. The discus-
sion in both the chapters ‘Seeing on the ground: everyday photography and North
Korea’ and ‘Seeing from above: satellite imagery and North Korea’ identifies
referents or patterns that have come to stand for particular ‘realities’ in North
Korea – such as distress and isolation.
With regard to the viewer and the viewed, Hariman and Lucaites (2007) con-
tend that images set up a relationship not only between them but also between the
subjects who appear in the pictures. Photographs, they argue, place objects within
a system of social relationships and create the viewer as a subject in that system
(Hariman/Lucaites 2007: 2). A good example of this is the pictures of atrocity
and human suffering that make viewers into witnesses, and which can construct
particular subject positions of ‘rescuer’ and ‘victim’. Similarly, Kress and van
Leeuwen (2006: 116–24) state that a direct look from a person towards the specta-
tor in an image connects both and establishes – at least on an imaginary level –
some form of relationship between them. The nature of this relationship would
depend on other facets, such as the facial expressions and gestures of the viewed
towards the viewer. While smiling persons evoke affinity and familiarity, helpless
persons may elicit distance and pity. These relationships will be taken up in the
chapter on everyday photography and North Korea (Chapter 3). Specific gestures
directed at the viewer – such as in the case of the infamous military recruitment
poster of the United States during the First and the Second World Wars (‘Uncle
Sam’) – reinforce eye contact and therefore rapport. Images affect their observers
since they define who the viewer is and in that way exclude others (Kress/van
Leeuwen 2006: 118). The way that images are produced also invites spectators to
look up from or look down on the depicted scenery which, in any case, entails
providing the spectator with a specific position towards what is being looked at.
For instance, while looking down could suggest a superior position of the viewer
towards the viewed, looking up in contrast indicates an inferior relationship.
Besides the content and spatial organization of an image, the use of colours –
such as their hue, saturation and value – is also important in the discussion of an
image. For instance, the chapter on satellite images and North Korea (Chapter 4)
shows how the brightness of some elements in images enables viewers to make
certain knowledge claims. Colours can direct the attention of the viewer to certain
aspects or elements of the image, by constructing, for instance, stark visual con-
trasts within the picture. An example of this is provided by a photograph (‘Canary
Underground’) in the Foreign Policy photo essay that will be discussed in greater
detail later. Predominantly dark(ened) images encapsulate different effects to
what light(ened) and bright(ened) images do. Black and white pictures tend to
reduce the complexity of original scenes to shades of grey. The way that colours
are employed in an image determine how realistic the image is considered to
be – and, hence, how authoritative it is (Kress/van Leeuwen 2006: 228–38).
The recurrence of specific compositional patterns that follow distinct genres
gives clues about the effects of images. In this regard, it can be asked whether the
selected images share particular features by depicting or emphasizing certain qual-
ities which endow them with a narrative – and therefore more comprehensible –
thread. With regard to the conditions under which images are displayed, there are
specific photographic arrangements that affect their rhetorical force (Shapiro
1988: Chapter 4). Photographic essays, for instance, deploy their signifying
functions through the telling of a particular narrative. For Mitchell (1994: 288–9),
the photo essay is a privileged model for the conjoining of language and photog-
raphy, due to the dominance of the textual essay that typically accompanies
images in newspapers and magazines. The compilation of photographs into a
sequential order conveys a narrative coherency, one which enhances their rhe-
torical force in contrast to the effect of a single, isolated picture. This is why the
book concentrates on this form of visual storytelling, rather than on a stand-alone
picture. Also, photo essays as visual–textual narratives – making up a large part
of North Korea’s pictorial representation – have yet not received significant ana-
lytical attention in image-based IR studies, as researchers tend to focus instead
on single/iconic photographs or on loosely-assembled images (for instance,
Bleiker/Kay 2007; Campbell 2011b; Heck/Schlag 2012; Laustsen 2008).
Photographic essays, in contrast to single pictures, are marked by what can be
called the organization or structuring of the gaze. Similar to museums or exhibi-
tions, which are spatial organizations of seeing (visitors’ eyes underlie spatial
forms), photo essays embed sight into a predefined context. Narrative coherency
in photo essays is established through visual connection and textual explanations
that can be augmented through the recurrence of similar compositional and con-
textual patterns throughout these images. That is to say, images that are selected
for photographic essays might resemble each other in what they feature and how
they show depicted subjects, in order to intensify the effects of the essay. However,
a particular effect is not only gained from similar images appearing in the same
sequence, but can also be derived from depictions that starkly contrast each
other. In addressing the context of reproduction and their relation to other signs,
it is therefore necessary to ask how images in a photo sequence relate to each
other and to the accompanying text, so as to expose their effects. Possible ques-
tions to be raised, then, are: how does the caption of an image engage or disengage
certain elements in the picture? What is the caption referring to in the image and
how does the image contribute to the text’s meaning? And, to what extent is the
image illustrative of the text, or is the text illustrative of the image?
The reference that an image makes to other images or symbolic motives can
give useful clues for a discussion of photography. Campbell (2002a, 2002b)
shows how pictures of gaunt Bosnian prisoners invoked a representational link to
the plight of the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. These instances of
what Hansen (2011) calls ‘inter-visual references’ can also be encountered in the
context of visual representations of North Korea. For example, the preference for
images in global media reports of North Korean military parades might be rooted
in certain pictorial similarities that they evoke; namely, through reference to the
militaristic deployments and paradigms of other totalitarian states – such as the
Soviet Union or the Third Reich (cf. Hughes 2007).
These aspects point to the contextual factors – which include, for example,
time, practices, settings and relations – with which images are encircled: who is the
photographer? When and where was the picture taken? Where was it published?
To which genre is the photograph referring? With regard to the circumstances
around the production of images, it has to be asked how images relate to, or are
affected by, the surrounding conditions.
Several authors have pointed to the difficulties stemming from (photo-)jour-
nalists rushing to areas and situations of which they have little knowledge or
experience (Bleiker/Kay 2007; Ricchiardi 2006; Vane 1997). Due to the sudden
arrival of reporters at, for instance, the scene of a humanitarian emergency this
practice is sometimes referred to as ‘parachute journalism’. Photographers and
journalists from news agencies only stay for a limited period of time, so as to
photograph and report on related events which – in addition to the lack of local
knowledge and narrow deadlines – can lead to the production of generic images
and news reports. They also depend on established contacts and networks with
humanitarian or governmental agencies to gain immediate access to the affected
areas (Campbell 2007a). Therefore it is not surprising that images of humanitar-
ian emergencies feature almost exclusively pictures of women and children
instead of, for instance, young men. It should also be noted that, due to their lack
of time, contacts and local knowledge, ‘parachuting’ journalists remain in cul-
tural and linguistic isolation.
Similar conditions also apply to North Korea, where (photo-)journalists and
other visitors reside only for a couple of days in the country. As many photogra-
phers and other travellers have reported about their journeys, they stay mainly in
Pyongyang with some organized day-trips undertaken in the capital’s vicinity
(for example, Burdick 2010; Morris 2005; Righetti 2003; Uimonen 2010; van
Houtryve 2009a). Nevertheless, their depictions are understood to stand for the
overall situation in North Korea. In other words, the life and reality of the coun-
try is inferred exclusively from glimpses and peeks of its capital.
Aside from the fact that foreigners are normally assigned a North Korean com-
panion for outside activities who, for instance, approves of or prevents the taking
of pictures, their scope of movement is limited due to official guidelines that
usually restrict the free circulation of visitors.8 While the watching function of
these companions (‘minders’) is regularly emphasized by visitors, it is also worthy
of mention that, due to their lack of knowledge about local venues and the lan-
guage, foreigners necessarily rely on their North Korean guides for orientation,
interpretation and personal safety.
What also has to be considered when looking at images are the implications
arising from subjective choices. For example, the publication of photographs in
(online) news media depends on editorial selections that may contribute to the
privileging of certain motifs and explains why only specific images appear while
others do not. In this vein, it could be investigated whether the same photograph
appeared elsewhere, possibly under a different heading or with an alternative
underlying caption, which in turn would enable a different reading. The produc-
tion and use of generic images of, for instance, starving children is not unfamiliar
in the case of North Korea. During the 1990s, humanitarian relief organizations
– such as the World Food Programme and World Vision Canada – deliberately
produced and utilized images of suffering children there in order to attract suf-
ficient funding for their operations (O’Clery 1997; Watson 1997).
Further contextual aspects that have to be considered in the discussion of vis-
ual representations are the political, social, technical and/or historical back-
grounds in which they are situated: how does a specific image relate to specific
political developments, or to other images and other image categories? To what
extent does a photograph refer to political dynamics or draws on characteristics
of a specific genre in order to manifest its effects? (Hariman/Lucaites 2007:
29–30). The question of whether an image depends on genre-typical traits – as
art, documentary, environmental and/or propaganda photography do – gives an
indication of its claim to authority, because different pictorial categories make
different knowledge claims (Shapiro 1988). For instance, the uses and functions
of images in advertisements differ from those in landscape photography. While
the former works by evoking – through visual and textual means – specific qual-
ities that are offered as being connected to an advertised product, the latter visu-
ally accentuates the presence and appreciation of picturesque natural pureness
and harmony (Clarke 1997; Marien 2002; Williamson 1978). The genre of docu-
mentary photography (for example street, press or war photography) is under-
stood to provide a different access to reality than, for instance, art photography
does. While documentary photography is expected to portray people, places and
issues as accurately and truthfully as possible, art photography prioritizes ques-
tions of aesthetics and creativity.
As a result, photo-journalism is credited with a different – that is, higher –
(political) authority because of its closer affiliation to the ‘real’ world. Hansen
(2011) contends that each visual genre, due to their varying relationships to the
‘real’, plays on different truth foundations. In other words, the modes through
which an issue like ‘real’ life in North Korea is conveyed affect the ways that the
issue can be conceived and granted truth status because of their different episte-
mological claims. It follows then that ‘truth’ is intimately linked to its form of
expression. However, it should be repeated that documentary photography, like
any other photographic genre, is not a neutral or natural mode of recording, but
an aesthetic style with its own subjective codes and conventions.
The degree to which a genre is thought of as making certain epistemological
claims is also important for the responses that are evoked or made possible.
Bleiker and Kay (2007), for instance, show in their discussion of photographic
depictions of AIDS in Africa that emotive responses like pity or compassion
depend on whether people with HIV are represented as merely being victims or
instead as equal human beings. In the present case, there are many instances
where the type of genre affects the appropriate responses. A case-in-point is
North Korean art works and the question of whether they are legitimate pieces
of art or merely propagandistic instruments by which to promote a totalitarian
ideology (Shim 2011). Addressing this question itself is significant in terms of
the political responses that are made possible: art can be admired, while propa-
ganda will be censored.
In sum, the methodological approach to images recognizes photographs as
particular material objects worthy of examination. The visual can be conceived
of as being part of a sequence of discursive practices and processes that construct
and structure knowledge. In considering images as parts of a broader set of rep-
resentations, methodological attention will be paid to the actual content of
images, the context and conditions of their production and their relationships
with and to accompanying texts and narrations.
Which images and whose representations?

Since the 1990s, imagery of North Korea has been increasingly available to an
outside audience. Pictures of tearful North Koreans mourning the death of their
president Kim Il-sung in 1994 soon spread across the world. Transported via
global news media networks, these images visually conveyed for the first time
the full extent of the personality cult in North Korea to an international audience.
During the same period, the political controversy about North Korea’s nuclear
and missile programmes – combined with potential proliferation activities as
well as international concerns about the evolving economic and humanitarian
crises in the country – contributed to the growing availability and dissemination
of visual material depicting a threatening – and at the same time indigent – North
Korea. It is these binary poles of what can be called North Korea’s ‘strength’ and
‘weakness’ that paradoxically relate the country to risk and danger within dis-
courses of international security (Shim/Nabers 2012).
The growing availability of visual images of North Korea can be partly
explained by the global technological innovations that took place in the 1990s.
Commercial remote sensing, digital photography and the internet – in combi-
nation with emerging news media networks such as CNN – facilitated the
production, dissemination and consumption of these images across the globe.9
The following section shows that imagery of North Korea – especially since the
2000s – has become increasingly prevalent, popular and is nowhere near as rare
as is often assumed. It should, therefore, be obvious that it is impossible to cover
the whole visual discourse on North Korea – present in caricatures, cartoons,
documentaries, exhibitions, films, movies, photographs and paintings – in a sin-
gle qualitative discussion. The work will adopt a problem-driven approach to
representing North Korea through imagery by examining two case studies or
areas of interest – everyday photography and satellite imagery – where photo-
graphic depictions are used in specific ways.
Both areas are well-qualified for an in-depth discussion because North Korea’s
living conditions and its striving for security repeatedly prove to be crucial in
international political discourse. In other words, issues concerning its daily life
as well as its security ambitions affect the ways in which political actors approach
North Korea, in that certain policy options – including issuing international
condemnations, resolutions or sanctions – follow suit. Photographs of North
Korea’s daily life combine to give testimony about the domestic situation to an
outside audience, while satellite imagery is believed to unveil for the global pub-
lic, among other things, events and developments related to its missile and nuclear
programmes. Both areas have in common that what is shown in these images
gives rise to certain knowledge claims, which, in turn, inform the severe ethical
and political accusations made by various actors (for instance, national govern-
ments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations) against
North Korea.
Without reigniting the core debate about whether political scientists should
start with a problem or with a method – a question which has been previously
discussed by Donald Green and Gary Shapiro (1994; see also, Shapiro 2002) –
the construction of a specific phenomenon as a problem (that is, the way in which
visual representations of North Korea are used in certain areas) attempts to con-
test popular accounts and promises to contribute much of practical and intellec-
tual importance to the study of the politics of representation (Howarth 2005;
Shapiro et al. 2004). Similar to those visual dictionaries that organize images
around themes or subject areas instead of adhering to an alphabetical order, the
images here are selected and discussed according to the aforementioned thematic
strands. These domains comprise what will be named in two separate chapters as
specific practices of looking: ‘Seeing on the ground’ and ‘Seeing from above’.
These two fields of vision should in no way be understood as being antagonis-
tic, but rather as complementary – in that they provide allegedly undistorted
sightings of, and insights into, North Korea. In this vein, they inform our knowl-
edge and thinking. Seeing on the ground and seeing from above conform in their
approach to truth and reality as they seem to be free both of any subjective inter-
ference or hidden political agenda. Because (documentary) photography and sat-
ellite imagery – the primary technologies of visualization that will be examined
in these chapters – exist as the very articulations of optical precision and techni-
cal accuracy, they are said to be capable of reproducing reality and truth exactly
as they are. However, this belief is rather misguided. It will be shown that both
modes of visuality, due to the image’s logic of inclusion and exclusion, are not
only highly selective and partial but rest upon a subjective understanding of who
or what deserves visual representation. These insights point to the interpretive
and imaginal dimensions of (documentary as well as space) imaging. However,
both practices of looking entail material consequences, as they inform the knowl-
edge upon which people act and on which they define their positions towards
each other.
The focus of ‘Seeing on the ground: everyday photography and North Korea’
is on the issues and conditions of everyday life in North Korea. In recent
times, many photographic essays and photo books depicting the daily life of
North Korean people have been published. Photo essays are chosen for analysis
because they possess the capacity to convey a particular narrative in a brief and
concise manner through the sequential ordering of delimited images, as well as
through their interplay with the accompanying text. Images are here identified
as a site of critical political inquiry. This chapter shows that issues of North
Korean daily life are relevant to larger questions of international politics and
argues that the ways in which these issues are represented are equally important
and need to be accounted for. The chapter discusses a photo essay by documen-
tary photographer Tomas van Houtryve (‘The Land of No Smiles’, 2009a) as an
exemplary case of how everyday life in North Korea is imaged and imagined
by outsiders.
The photo series is a good example of the assertion that photographic depic-
tions of daily life in North Korea are subject to a form of visuality that is hegem-
onic, because only particular perspectives – and hence interpretations – are
sanctioned, while others are excluded altogether. The fact that this photographic
essay appeared in Foreign Policy – an internationally-renowned and influential
US magazine that addresses global economic and political affairs, and which
thus has a greater chance of reaching the public eye – shows that almost all
areas and aspects of North Korea – even depictions of its daily life – are con-
strued as belonging to the higher realms of world politics. In order to avoid a
self-affirmation of the argument by examining only the hegemonic perspective,
the photo essay published in Foreign Policy is then contrasted with alternative
accounts that invite totally different ways of seeing, in order to show the implica-
tions of depictions that challenge the hegemonic framework and point of view.
The subsequent chapter, ‘Seeing from above: satellite imagery and North Korea’,
focuses on the use of remote sensing imagery, which attempts to disclose secret
sites, activities and developments related to North Korea’s military programmes
(missiles and nuclear weapons) as well as to its human rights situation (prison
camps). The chapter discusses an example of hegemonic ‘remote seeing’ –
namely the iconic satellite picture motif of North Korea by night – before it is
shown what counter-hegemonic representations and, more importantly, their
effects look like. Interestingly, the content of the image itself does not need to be
altered for this purpose – indicating that images always interact with other signs
such as language and text. The example of the iconic picture motif shows how
people make sense of a particular place, in this case North Korea, in a certain
way – ‘isolated’, ‘repressed’, ‘underdeveloped’ – through (satellite) images. Remote
sensing practices are, then, instances of visual spatial imaginaries because they
define how people perceive – that is, how people imagine – particular spaces,
places and sites. This chapter then chooses three instances, beginning from the
1990s, to illustrate how satellite vision is implicated in international political
dynamics: satellite images enabled specific actors to know, and thus to act upon
what they were able or made to see. However, the examples used bring to light the
fact that, while it might be clear what a satellite picture shows, it neither informs
us what the depiction means nor what has to be done in response.
One important remark needs to be made with regard to methodological (and
epistemological) aspects in the discussion about visual representations of
North Korea. It essentially refers to the question of authenticity of North Korea
images and how knowledge – via practices of looking – can be gained. However,
these aspects are not necessarily unique to the country in question but apply,
generally speaking, to all cases where particular images (or other forms of repre-
sentation including art, architecture and music) are quickly designated and con-
demned as propaganda, brainwashing or disinformation. The issue at stake also
addresses the (competitive) relationship between what can be called external
representations of North Korea and North Korea’s self-representations. As men-
tioned above, all foreigners who enter the country – especially photographers –
are usually assigned a North Korean counterpart when undertaking outdoor
activities. This counterpart has to be asked before one takes pictures or records
films. The necessity for permission reveals the attempts by the North Korean
leadership to control the visual field, by setting the conditions of visibility –
presumably, in the hope of producing certain kinds of knowledges and structuring
in advance the interpretation of such images. In this sense, pictures that contain
no ‘negative’ image motifs (for example, poverty) would elicit no ‘negative’ inter-
pretations (for example, an impoverished country).
It was also noted that a similar approach can be found in the ‘image policy’ of
the US Department of Defense, which has attempted to influence film and pho-
tography coverage of its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the practice of
‘embedded reporting’ (Butler 2009). While the regulation of visibility indicates
how seeing itself is being politicized on the part of (not only) the North Korean
authorities, it might lead to the assumption that foreign photographers somehow
necessarily reproduce the visual perspective of the North Korean state, thereby
making themselves possible accomplices to the country’s leadership by support-
ing only official perspectives, values and attitudes. Taken in this way, foreign
photographers would thus only picture what they were permitted to see, which,
in turn, cannot but result in the production of ‘positive’ – or, in other words,
propagandistic – imagery. If this is the case, how can we know and ascertain
whether a particular set of images that has been produced by a foreign photogra-
pher in North Korea reflects the ‘official’ or ‘unofficial’ view? This question
about the ‘official’ or ‘unofficial’ character of North Korea images is of the
utmost importance, because it affects their capacity to function as authentic ref-
erents of the real. While the former type can easily be deemed – and quickly
condemned – as propagandistic and thus regarded as unauthentic, the latter is
appreciated because it apparently promises to offer the viewer undistorted evi-
dence and authentic insights into ‘real’ life in North Korea.
Foreign photographers certainly work within a particular framework or scope:
accommodation, travel programmes and itineraries are usually predetermined
and might also explain why almost all varieties of photographic work resemble
each other in their picture motifs (for example, casting North Korean monu-
ments, military parades and/or mass games). However, asides from the fact that
the photographers of the selected photo essays in the chapter ‘Seeing on the
ground: everyday photography and North Korea’ claim to have gained unregu-
lated views of the country’s interior, hence defying the ‘visual instructions’ of the
North Korean state, it should also be stressed that even interference over what
and how to image does not ensure that pictures are going to be interpreted in the
‘proper’ way. Due to the ambiguous nature of images and their inherent surplus
of meaning, any interpretations thereof cannot be controlled. As such, even
official North Korean imagery is open to a range of possible interpretations:
military parades are not a show of strength but a sign of belligerence; mass
gymnastics are not skilful artistic performances but submissive expressions of
regime loyalty; photographs of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il did not
demonstrate his health but fuelled debates about his illness. Regardless of what
the image producers’ intentions or instructions are, pictures are continuously
reinterpreted and (re)invested with different meanings.
This insight resembles what Roland Barthes had in mind when he wrote his
famous essay The Death of the Author: the intentions of an author are unrelated
to the interpretation of his or her text. The author cannot, therefore, control how his
or her text is processed. And while the experiences of the photographers also
indicate that total control of image production is not possible – because pictures
can also be taken secretively – invoking the question of authenticity has its own
pitfalls and dilemmas since one is obliged to give an answer to an essentially
unanswerable question – what constitutes an authentic North Korea photograph?
The antagonism between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ ways of seeing indicates
a struggle between these two regimes of vision. North Korea intends to control
the visual field by various means: art, film, internet, news, painting and tele-
vision are all state-controlled media, ones which enable the leadership to deter-
mine the form and content of what can be seen inside the country, as well as
how. However, the North Korean state not only releases and disseminates images
to a domestic audience, but also targets an international viewership outside of
the country via news cooperation agreements with several globally-operating
media companies – including Xinhua (China), Itar-tass (Russia), Kyodo (Japan)
and the AP (United States). TV footage and photo coverage of large events
like North Korea’s national holiday, party gatherings or the funeral of former
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il are good examples of this.
In contrast to this means of official self-expression stand ‘unofficial’ external
representations of North Korea, which are those depictions that are not usually
made or controlled by the country’s authorities. Hence, photographic essays or
satellite images, like those discussed in this work, are examples of such external
representations. Although it is not the focus of this book, the former (‘official’
vision) seems to succumb to the latter (‘unofficial’ vision), simply because eve-
rything associated with ‘official’ North Korean perspectives (be it aural, textual
or visual) is delegitimized outside of the country as propaganda – while the
‘unofficial’ external view is sanctioned as being the only way to acquire mean-
ingful knowledge about North Korea. In this way, the ‘unofficial’ external
perspective achieves hegemonic status because its central articulation – that it is
the only way to provide objective knowledge about the country – operates in all
kinds of photographic representations of North Korea shown to the public outside
of the country. It is the effects of this kind of ‘hegemonic visuality’ that form part
of this book’s inquiry (for studies that examine the ‘official’ visual perspective
in North Korea – which include the arts, film, theatre and architecture – see, for
instance, Frank 2011; Kim SY 2010; Meuser 2011; Myers 2010; Portal 2005).
At the same time, the fact that North Korea often criticizes reports or state-
ments made by foreign governments, media and non-governmental organizations
shows the concern of the authorities there about how North Korea’s actions, opin-
ions and values are (predominantly negatively) described and depicted by the
outside world. In other words, the North Korean leadership is well aware of the
tension between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ means of representation; as a result,
they are compelled to react to the (hegemonic) external frame of reference.
Suffice to say that the emphasis on, as well as the reiteration and absence of,
particular image motifs not only contributes to a hegemonic form of visuality but
also unfolds across categorical boundaries.
The representation of North Korea as a threat to national security by using
(both ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’) images of its weaponry and military is not lim-
ited to foreign (for example, North American and European) governmental, aca-
demic or journalist sources, but is also prevalent in, for instance, Japan and South
Korea. Depictions of ‘ordinary’ North Koreans as victims and generic images of
starvation and desperation are not only visible and disseminated in ‘Western’
media outlets but are also apparent in ‘non-Western’ media broadcasts like those
by Al-Jazeera (Qatar), Kyodo (Japan) and Yonhap (South Korea). The portrayal
of ordinary North Koreans as a brainwashed, robot-like and homogenous horde –
almost always accompanied by images showing crowds of people – is a popular
representational pattern that resonates beyond well-established geographical,
national and cultural boundaries (an example is Asiapress International 2010).
It is asserted here that what is mediated by this hegemonic mode of visuality has
a truly global reach and appeal.
The foregrounding of particular aspects in and through images creates what
Derek Gregory (2003: 224) calls a ‘constructed visibility’, which in turn enables
particular objects to be seen in certain ways. The problem here may not be so
much the presence or substance of particular recurring image motifs, but rather
the absence of alternative ways of seeing and, therefore, knowing than those that
are mediated by global news and photo agencies to transnational audiences. The
reference to the global character of North Korea representations resembles what
several authors have called the ‘global visual economy’10 (for example, Mitchell
2002; Poole 1997; Rose 2010) and is a good way to depart from and leave behind
traditional and widespread designations like ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ repre-
sentations, because of the elusiveness and the difficulty of maintaining a clear-cut
distinction between these respective terms.
The concept of the ‘West’ is a floating and arbitrary category that changes
according to context and purpose. It is nothing more than a discursive imaginary
that proceeds along the lines of constantly shifting cultural, economic, geo-
graphical, historical, religious, social and/or political boundaries. For instance, is
a photograph a ‘Western’ depiction because of the name, birthplace, residence,
education and/or aesthetic style of the photographer (what if the photographer
has not lived, been born or educated in the ‘West’ but now works in a ‘Western’
media company?), because of the designated or undesignated audiences for the
photograph or because of its place of publication and distribution? (Does the
viewership or the site of release determine if an image is a ‘Western’ depiction
or not?)
In this regard, Campbell (2009) calls attention to the imperative for profes-
sional photo-journalism, according to which photographers have to adapt to the
codes and norms of their global media employers like Reuters and the Associated
Press. These mechanisms would condition the terms of how images are produced
and disseminated. Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (2001) show how what
they call ‘practices of looking’ have developed and been shared across different
locations and among disparate people (see also, Buck-Morss 2002; Constantinou
et al. 2008; Mirzoeff 2005). Speaking of a ‘global media environment’, which is
the result of the emergence of new information and communication technologies,
the rise of multinational media corporations and the loss of significance for the
sovereign nation-state, they argue that media images are imbued with many
conventions and meanings, which transcend the confines of traditional distinc-
tions like ‘First World/Third World’ – or, for that matter, ‘Western/non-Western’
(Sturken/Cartwright 2001: 327).
The idea that the global circulation and consumption of images could also
amount to a globalization of visual culture – or visual economy – provides a
good opportunity to rethink these generic categorizations (see also, Kocur 2011;
Poole 1997). While, for instance, it is often claimed or condemned that ‘Western’
societies are obsessed with images – which, at the same time, seems to be an
idiosyncratic feature of them – it can reasonably be asked why this should not
also apply to so-called ‘non-Western’ societies. This is not to evoke or engage in
a fundamental philosophical debate about the role of the visual in ‘Western’ or
‘non-Western’ thinking – this has been done more fruitfully and thoroughly else-
where (for example, Jay 1994; Mitchell 1994) – but is simply to point to contem-
porary global practices and uses of the visual that transcend given national and
cultural boundaries.
In other words, questions of vision and visuality may have different philosoph-
ical and historical origins in different parts of the world, but the value of images –
their ability to function as authoritative referents of reality – is not exclusively
recognized by contemporary ‘Western’ societies alone: images matter as much to
states, societies and citizens in South America, West Africa, East Asia and the
Middle East as they do in the so-called ‘West’, because pictures mediate the
knowledge upon which people act, react and interact (see also, Elkins 2010;
Elkins et al. 2009). In other words, the value or articulation of images has a uni-
versal dimension that can be seen by their similar use by states and societies
around the globe: images are used for the purpose of political and societal pro-
motion and publicity, for the distribution of public information, for public sur-
veillance, for legal evidence in court, for traffic control, for the recording of
individuals – in the form of official documents – and for the preservation of
public and private memories.
All this is to argue that the ways in which North Korea is represented in images
cannot necessarily be tied whatsoever to a ‘Western’ or ‘non-Western’ domain –
as many commentators have done – but has, rather, to be conceived of in terms of
a more overarching representational framework that prescribes how North Korea
both looks and how it is to be looked at. Because the present discussion cannot
serve as a complete account of how North Korea is represented in visual dis-
course, the following chapter discusses examples of two areas where imagery
arguably has the greatest effect on our knowing of North Korea: everyday
photography and satellite imagery.
2 Practices of looking and
North Korea
Against the background of the above-outlined methodological steps, the following

chapters discuss what have been called particular practices of looking – ‘seeing
on the ground’ and ‘seeing from above’ – to illustrate the uses and functions of
images in the representation of North Korea. As indicated, methodological atten-
tion will be paid to the formal and contextual aspects of images by investigating
the circumstances, patterns and motifs in visual representations of North Korea.
The following sections will also expose how visuality is engaged in the wider
debates of politics. Guiding questions for these subject areas include: how is
knowledge conveyed through images? What kinds of image motifs are shown to
the viewer? What are the viewers permitted to see when images of North Korea
are presented to them? Is there room for images that resist or challenge a specific
perspective? How are images used for certain purposes and how are images
enacted to provoke particular responses or to legitimate action?
Before elaborating on each of the subject areas, some general remarks should
be made about the role of these images in the representation of North Korea. Such
images of North Korea have a documentary nature, which means that they are
employed as factual records of the developments and events going on in the
country. In this vein, images are positioned so as to make epistemological claims,
after which they capture nothing less than the truth. Due to their functioning as
incontrovertible evidence of the real, images are significant, compelling and
authoritative, and imply, therefore, that they have the outright ability to define
people, places and events.
The authority and credibility to ‘speak’ about issues carries more weight in the
description of the unknown, the hidden or difficult-to-access sites and people. As
North Korea is often portrayed metaphorically – and sometimes literally, as in
the case of Barbara Demick’s (2009) use of a satellite image – as a black hole,
meaning simply a lack or void of knowledge, visual images certainly have a spe-
cial impact on the ways in which people come to know, imagine and think about
particular occurrences in North Korea. That is to say, the knowledge and percep-
tion of the global general public concerning North Korea are not only affected
by (verbal or written) reports, assessments and testimonies of governments,
intelligence agencies, scholars, journalists and humanitarian aid organiza-
tions, but are also shaped by visual images related, for instance, to its nuclear
48 Practices of looking and North Korea
programme or to its humanitarian situation. Hence, how we respond to certain
issues or developments in North Korea – for instance with outrage, opposition
and/or pity concerning the conditions of everyday life there – depends, in part at
least, on how these issues are conveyed to us through visual means in the media
and elsewhere.
A good example of the power of – and some of the repercussions that are
attributable to – photography are images of starving people that have been taken
in North Korea. In this regard, long-term North Korea observers Ralph Hassig
and Kong-dan Oh (2009: 118–19) note in their book, The Hidden People in
North Korea, that ‘the reality of the suffering of millions of North Koreans is
better delivered by photographs of severely malnourished children and their
gaunt parents than by looking at tables of statistics’. While Hassig and Oh refer
here to the logic of the self-evidence of images – accordingly, an image speaks
for itself – this ‘better’ suitability of photographs for the representation of reality
should be particularly borne in mind with regard to how pictures are used, what
people know of particular events and what is taken to be involved in this process.
This is not to question the accuracy of famine pictures per se, but rather to
point to the functions, effects and implications of such representations. Moreover,
images should not be conceived of as mediating objective information, but
instead should be thought of as evoking purposeful, affective responses on the
part of the viewer – amounting to a change of the characteristics of the image
from informative to normative: photographs of human suffering do not necessar-
ily show what is going on, rather they tell us how we should feel about what is
going on (cf. Campbell 2007a).
For instance, a common – albeit disputed – practice in humanitarian relief work
is the commercial use of photographs for fundraising campaigns that predomi-
nantly depict starving mothers and their children (Moeller 1999). Humanitarian
relief operations in North Korea are no exception to this custom. An example of
the commercial use – and far-reaching consequences – of visual depictions is an
episode from the mid-1990s, relating to what is described today as a massive
famine that occurred in North Korea at that time. Newspapers around the world
published, in July 1997, a moving photograph of a malnourished North Korean
child, which, according to its photographer Hilary Mackenzie – who had taken
the picture for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) – had a sig-
nificant impact in terms of donations and food aid subsequently obtained. Citing
the power of images to elicit action and reaction, Mackenzie explained to a North
Korean official that the food shortages had to be shown to the donors in order to
receive more food aid (O’Clery 1997). In an account of her experiences in
North Korea published in The New York Times, she recalls the initial reluctance
of North Korean authorities to grant her an entrance visa (Mackenzie 1997).
With regard to these difficulties, she recounts that ‘after turning down the visa
[applications] several times, the North Koreans were led to believe that unless
some reporter was let in they were at risk for international support’ (ibid.). A few
days after Mackenzie was asked, in June 1997, by the WFP to document the food
situation, through photographs and video, she obtained an entry permit.
Practices of looking and North Korea 49
In fact, only a week after the publication of Mackenzie’s photographs, the
WFP met its US$60 million target for food aid to North Korea, which was, at that
time, by far the quickest response during nearly two years of often difficult fun-
draising efforts made by the UN organization (Mickleburgh 1997). However,
Mackenzie’s images also caused a great stir on the part of the North Korean
government. North Korean officials denounced her pictures and complained
that they would make the child ‘look like a starving African’ (O’Clery 1997) and
North Korea ‘look like Africa’ (Mickleburgh 1997); a location which has long
been (and sometimes still is) associated with hunger, war, catastrophe, disease
and death. In the end, the photographer was expelled and the WFP was nearly
forced to terminate its humanitarian operation over the incident (Natsios 2001).
Andrew Natsios (2001: 190), then vice-president of World Vision, whose
relief organization was also operational in North Korea at that time, stated that
‘her photographs had exposed to the entire world the abysmal failure of the
North Korean government to feed its own people and embarrassed the regime in
a way no event in fifty years had done’. With regard to the remarks of the North
Korean officials, it is striking that these photographs were attributed with the
power not only to define individual identity (‘made him look like a starving
African’, (O’Clery 1997)) but also to affect collective identity (‘you make us look
like Africa’, (Mickleburgh 1997)). The episode also points to the importance
of visuality for the performance of (humanitarian) actions, and shows how
seeing – as a way of knowing – is intimately involved in the processes that set the
conditions for particular ethical and political responses.
What should also be noted here is the employment of the starving child as a
symbol or marker for the suffering of an entire nation. In this regard, Figure 2.1 –
a picture that appeared in, among other publications, the British newspaper The
Observer (1997) – could be a useful means by which to gain insights into what
images do and how they interact with language. The image is put to work not
only to elicit action – because anything done to the part (the child) is presumed
to benefit the whole (the nation), as a result of the synecdoche’s establishing of a
causal link between part and whole – but also to affect the ways in which the
viewer envisions occurrences in North Korea as a result of the interplay between
the photograph and the text.
According to the accompanying text, the picture shows a child lying on a floor
in a North Korean hospital carrying the heading ‘A nation’s hunger in a child’s
face’. Language and image complement and rely on each other in order to convey
a particular interpretation. The reason is simple: the news article would not
deliver the same effect that it does without the displaying of the photograph. So it
is only through the image that the text comes to make sense. The heading directly
refers to the image. As such, it is almost needless to say that the bare revelation
of the image without any accompanying signs would hinder a proper under-
standing. The photograph epitomizes a pars pro toto representation, with the
‘motionless’ and ‘listless’ child – who embodies the ‘nation’s hunger’ – standing
for the suffering and plight of the North Korean people as a whole. The ailing
child1 serves as a particular signifier for the country’s domestic conditions, and
Figure 2.1 ‘A nation’s hunger in a child’s face’

Acknowledgement: Image courtesy of UNICEF;
© UNICEF/NYHQ1997-0435/Jeremy Horner.
provides the viewer with an interpretative framework that only allows for the
reading of the image as indicative of a nation-wide humanitarian crisis.
The photograph – together with its captions – purports to offer a summary of
nourishment in the country, and suggests that North Korea’s reality is proceeding
in the same way as the child’s. The effect that is evoked here is the result of a syn-
ecdochic employment of the image and its title – the representational practice that
was introduced and dissected in Chapter 1. Viewers of this image are invited to
supply their own concluding interpretation about the depicted situation. The enthy-
memic function facilitates the mobilization of action, because the synecdochic
employment of image and text establishes a causal link between the well-being
of the part (the child) and the well-being of the whole (the nation): anything done
to the part is understood to benefit the whole. As will be shown later, the use of
synecdoche plays a crucial role in the representation of daily life in North Korea,
and provides a form of knowledge that is oversimplified and fragmentary. The
partial content (child) assumes the legitimate representation of the whole (nation),
and becomes in this way constitutive of the totality.
What is also interesting with this photograph is that the article shows only
a cropped version of the original image which includes also other children
(information courtesy of an UNICEF email inquiry; see Figure 2.2). Important
to mention in this regard is the function of exclusion as it directs the emotive
attention of the reader/viewer solely to the child which, in turn, enhances the
Figure 2.2 Original photograph

Acknowledgement: Image courtesy of UNICEF;
© UNICEF/NYHQ1997-0435/Jeremy Horner.
effect of the synecdoche. Furthermore, the original caption of the image also
contrasts the content of the news article’s message text.2 While the original
text speaks of an orphanage and not of a hospital, more important, the number
of children suffering from malnutrition is given as much lower – 80,000 instead
of 800,000 – as in the article.
Visuality, knowledge, politics

While it is argued that images play a significant role in how we approach and
apprehend particular issues related to North Korea, visual imagery of the country
seems, in general, to be seen as rare or special; not coincidentally, this belief
is indicative of the perceived paucity of reliable information and knowledge.
A common footnote in the media coverage of North Korea is, for instance, the
emphasis on the fact that ‘rare visits’ by foreigners provide ‘rare glimpses’ into a
nation that is commonly believed to be the most isolated country in the world.
Through images, North Korea is not only exposed to closer observation from an
external audience but is also ‘discovered’ in the first place. We are thereby able
to see and explore with our own eyes how conditions, issues and developments
are ‘over there’, while simultaneously failing to recognize that our vision
(and, ipso facto, perception) depends on what we are permitted to see by various
actors – including photographers, editors and publishers. Moreover, making
sense of such images in terms of a discovery not only presupposes a particular
notion of absent knowledge and visibility – suggesting that we have never seen
something like this before – it also legitimizes certain practices of looking, ones
which are akin to voyeurism such as peeking and peering, and which would be
considered inappropriate and offensive under different circumstances.
The presumed lack of images might, to a large extent, be explained by the restric-
tions that the North Korean government has placed on the international media’s
access to its country. Possibly as a consequence of this move, pictures and films
depicting North Korea and its purported reality are regarded as even more spe-
cial (and authoritative), following the economic principle by which the value of
a good is bound to its scarcity: the smaller the quantity of the good that is avail-
able, the more valuable it is. This – at least presumed – exceptional situation
suggests that because the outside world does not see much of North Korea, its
observers do not possess sufficient knowledge about it – which, in turn, creates a
legitimate reason or quasi-imperative for seeking out visual representations of it.
To know and to grasp means to make visible the unknown. There are many
examples of works that aim to ‘expose’, ‘peek into’ or offer ‘glimpses’ of North
Korea (for example, Morris 2005; Boston Globe 2009). In this vein, almost every
image that allows a brief look at North Korea is considered relevant in the
enhancement of our understanding of the country. Arguably, this point also
applies to a range of different actors, including journalists, scholars, aid workers
and government analysts.
In this regard, it is important to highlight again the function of seeing as a way
of knowing. Countless publications, photographic essays, illustrated books,
reports and documentaries – not to mention the various different platforms, social
networks and services on the internet such as Flickr, Youtube and Google Earth –
not only serve to refute the veracity of the oft-claimed rarity of visual images of
(and, in some measure, the lack of knowledge about) North Korea, but also dem-
onstrate the profound demand for such images, making them a topic of global
interest. The following selection of the most recent examples of such works
include photographic essays, travel reports, illustrated books and photo exhibi-
tions by (online) media outlets, newspapers, magazines and/or professional pho-
tographers: Associated Press (for example, Lee 2010a; Lee/Guttenfelder 2011),
BBC (for example, Lloyd-Roberts 2010; Pescali 2009), Lars Bech (2007), Bild
(Reichelt 2010), Boston Globe (2008, 2009), Philippe Chancel (2006), CNN (for
example, Salmon 2010), Charlie Crane (2007), Luca Faccio (2007), Foreign Policy
(van Houtryve 2009a), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Kolonko 2009), the
Guardian (for example, Guttenfelder 2008; Kalashnikova 2010), Mark Edward
Harris (2009), Gary Knight (2003), Yannis Kontos (2006), Werner Kranwetvogel
(2007), Life (for example, 2009, 2010), mare (Keith 2010), Neue Zürcher Zeitung
(van Houtryve 2010), The New York Times (for example, Du Bin 2010; Lee CW
2008), Newsweek (for example, Fragala Smith 2009; Uimonen 2010), RIA
Novosti (for example, 2006, 2008), Righetti (2003), stern.de (Escher 2011), Time
(for example, Morris 2005; van Houtryve 2009b), Watanabe (2009). Alongside all
these are the countless professional and private photo records available at image-
hosting websites.3 Often, picture series by photo-journalists are reproduced in
several media outlets. A recent example is the photographs of AP photographer
David Guttenfelder, whose North Korea images (Lee/Guttenfelder 2011) were,
among others, published in: the online version of The Atlantic (Taylor 2011),
Financial Times Deutschland (Kuhn/Klein 2011), Spiegel Online (2011), The
New York Times (Lee 2011) and The Washington Post (2011).
These references reveal, on the one hand, the enduring visualization of
North Korea in contemporary discourses. Contrary to popular belief, images of
North Korea are clearly nowhere near as scarce as they are generally presumed
to be. On the other hand, this broad media fascination also indicate that images
are not mere illustrations for news, but appear also to be news in and of them-
selves; they are not only supportive of knowledge but constitute knowledge in
their own right and, as such, they actively participate in the wider debates and
political dynamics, making them sound objects of academic inquiry. Resembling
the logic of ‘I will not believe it until I see it’, this situation points to the links
between ways of seeing, knowledge and politics: images not only help people
see – and therefore understand – what is ‘really’ going on, they also enable
people to know, which informs their political and ethical responses.
For instance, the inspections of North Korea’s nuclear facilities by officials
from the International Atomic Energy Agency or the monitoring of food aid dis-
tribution by personnel from international humanitarian aid organizations are
profound visual practices that elevate seeing to a form of knowledge, one which
allows the inspectors and observers to make legitimate statements about North
Korea’s nuclear programme (and thus potentially to, for example, recommend
punitive actions in case of non-compliance with international agreements) or its
domestic food situation (as a result of which, for example, an appeal for food
assistance might be launched). Another example of this elevation is the video that
was secretly filmed in 1998 by a North Korean, showing scenes from daily life in
the country. As Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan (1999) concluded, ‘so little good
information exists about North Korea that even a few minutes of shaky videotape
are a valuable tool in the effort to figure out the improbably resilient and
well-armed Stalinist fortress in the middle of East Asia’.
Noting that American and South Korean government officials analysed the
video to search for meaning, they reveal that such images were among the sources
that contributed to the so-called ‘Perry Report’, a policy document announcing
one of the most significant re-evaluations of American foreign policy towards
North Korea (Sullivan/Jordan 1999). There are also many other examples that
suggest the importance of image interpretation for governmental and non-
governmental approaches to North Korea – in particular, military objects such as
tanks, rockets and submarines that appear in military parades, satellite pictures
and/or TV footage are scrutinized (for example, Jung SK 2010; Kim TH 2010;
Yoo JH 2010). Looking at the appearance, movement and design of these objects,
military and intelligence analysts – as well as scholars and journalists – then
draw inferences about the capability (for example, what is the performance of the
object?) and authenticity (for example, are the objects a mock-up?) of the depicted
objects and by implication the North Korean state as a whole (for example, Jung
SK 2010; Schiller/Schmucker 2012).
The most prominent example illustrating the broad relationship between visu-
ality, knowledge and politics – and which highlights the indispensability of inter-
preting North Korea images for politics – is the pictures of former North Korean
leader Kim Jong-il. Photographs of Kim would emerge as core referents of a
debate in which the pictures were believed to provide authoritative information
about the state of his health, giving rise to many political, diplomatic and military
discussions about a possible succession and the future of North Korea in, among
other countries, South Korea and the United States. The debate about his health
and a possible dynastic transfer of power emerged after he was reported to have
suffered a stroke in 2008. However, such reports and rumours about Kim’s health
were not new and had already surfaced two years before in 2006, prompting
concern among the governments of South Korea and the United States.
The example of the former North Korean leader illustrates the importance of
sight for politics and shows that certain contextual factors (for example, when
was the picture taken? Where was it taken? When was it published?) acutely
matter. While, for instance, the South Korean Ministry of Unification published
annually a report that kept count of his total number of public appearances and
field trips in the country, it also paid attention to how he looked, what he did dur-
ing his visits and where and when his visits took place. In the hope of being
offered further clues and insights about Kim’s state of health, South Korean gov-
ernment officials – as well as the country’s scholars and journalists – examined
his photographs in fine detail in a search for meaning (for example, did he lose
or gain weight? Is he using his left arm? What kind of shoes is he wearing?)
(for example, Chosun Ilbo 2010a, 2011b; Kim C 2011a; Kim S 2010a; Kim SJ
2009, 2010; Kim SY 2009; Kolonko 2009; Lee TH 2010).
An example of the significance of such sources is that South Korea’s defence
minister, in 2009, gave assurances – in a session convened with the National
Assembly’s Defence Committee – that intelligence authorities were watching
for any deterioration in Kim’s health, ‘in light of recent photos and public activ-
ity’ (cited in Chosun Ilbo 2009). The same action was taken by the South Korean
Ministry of Unification, which scrutinized for instance pictures of Kim that
showed him seated in a chair, possibly thereby indicating that his health was
deteriorating. Ministry officials concluded that, ‘our judgment is that it is diffi-
cult to see any signs of his failing health from yesterday’s picture’ (cited in Kim H
2009). Yet another example is the US State Department, which, as a spokesman
noted, regularly looked at and analysed such photographs of Kim (US DoS 2008).
Such practices also hold true with regard to images of current North Korean
leader Kim Jong-un, who has continued his father’s tradition of the so-called
‘field guidance trips’ – which include visits to military units, factories and
agricultural cooperatives. In light of these events, as well as his public appear-
ances, photographs of Kim Jong-un are likewise examined. Particular attention
is paid to his actions (for example, how did he interact with soldiers, peasants
and workers?), entourage (for example, who accompanied him?), appearance
(for example, what kind of shoes did he wear?) and whereabouts (for example,
how many times did he visit an economic- or military-related facility?) (see, for
instance, Choe SH 2012; Chosun Ilbo 2012; IFES 2012). These kinds of ques-
tions were of particular importance for foreign government officials, scholars
and journalists after the release of a range of pictures of Kim Jong-un in July
2012, as part of what appeared to be a publicity drive by North Korea’s authorities.
To the surprise of many external (and perhaps also internal) observers, images of
Kim Jong-un depicted him enjoying a music performance that featured, among
others, (unlicensed) characters from the Walt Disney company, including Mickey
Mouse and Minnie Mouse. At the same event, other popular American entertain-
ment icons were being played or displayed: a rendition of the famous soundtrack to
‘Rocky’ – accompanied by clips from the movie – as well as the song ‘My Way’
by Frank Sinatra. Other photographs of Kim that were circulated by the state
news agency KCNA showed him and a woman – who later turned out to be his
wife – in an amusement park, at a concert and at a zoo.
What is important to note in this regard is that these images – in tandem with
the reshuffling of personnel in the senior ranks of the military – became part of
what was hoped by some outside observers to be signs of a policy change taking
place among the North Korean leadership. In other words, the mere display of
pictures that were in contrast to the photographs of Kim Jong-il’s onsite inspec-
tions, which tended to be rather passive and static, were almost sufficient enough
in themselves to generate speculation about North Korean policy shifts, changes
in conduct and altering attitudes. Alongside some academic analysts, the South
Korean Minister for Unification, Yu Woo-ik, was sufficiently encouraged to
believe and communicate that these visible changes could be signs of a general
shift in North Korea (Shin HH 2012). That the South Korean National Intelligence
Service released information about the wife of Kim Jong-un – for instance, that
she, Ri Sol-ju, is a singer, who was born in 1989 and who had wed Kim Jong-un
in 2009 – shows that images and their interpretation (as banal as they seem with,
for instance, photographs taken of the waving wife of Kim Jong-un) are part of
governmental authorities’ knowledge-gathering and -assessment practices.
While North Korea’s news agency, in an apparent reaction to Yu’s public
remarks, attempted to put an end speculation about whether the country’s leader-
ship would change by stating that it would be ‘foolish’ to expect different policies
to ensue (Ramstad 2012), the debate about visible changes, as well as about Kim
Jong-il’s health, illustrates how images become involved in political dynamics
through their use by governments, journalists and academia – primarily because
they promise to offer insights upon which actors can act and/or make meaningful
statements.4
3 Seeing on the ground
Everyday photography and
North Korea
This chapter discusses visual representations, specifically in photographic essays,

of what can be summarized as everyday life in North Korea. To explain further
why both issues of daily life and photographic representations thereof are relevant
to larger questions of international relations it is first necessary to outline their
intersections and to situate them in the wider political discourse.
Beginning approximately in the mid-1990s, general living conditions in
North Korea became a recurring subject of global media concern. At that time
North Korea was suffering from a series of natural disasters, the impact of which
was exacerbated by the country’s ailing economic system. Already severely
affected by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the ensuing loss of its main
trade partners from the former Eastern Bloc as a result of the end of the Cold
War, North Korea’s economic output sharply declined in the 1990s. Hit by this
worsening economic situation, humanitarian conditions deteriorated heavily,
leading to what Natsios (2001) described as the ‘Great North Korean Famine’,
with millions of casualties.1 Since then, discussions and speculations about North
Korea’s continually predicted, and in some ways continually desired, collapse
became widespread and popular among governmental, academic and media cir-
cles around the globe. In particular, the security implications of possible chaos in
North Korea, which would, it was feared, cause regional instabilities as a result
of a power vacuum and the flow of refugees crossing North Korea’s national
borders, were at the centre of such debates. Countless reports, assessments and
predictions addressing the putative end of North Korea were published hence-
forth (for example, Eberstadt 1999; Foster-Carter 1997; Huh MY 1996; Kim KW
1996; Lee K 1997).
Yet, debates about the imminent and impending breakdown of North Korea’s
systems still foster academic, journalistic, military and/or political approaches
with regard– so the rumour goes – to its uncertain future (for example, Eberstadt
2009; Kaplan 2006; Lankov 2006; Noland 2002; O’Hanlon 2009; Stares/Wit
2009; Zakaria 2010). Military contingency strategies and exercises by the United
States and South Korea that, among other things, prepare for the dissolution of
the North Korean state (for example, ‘OPLAN 5029’, ‘Key Resolve’, ‘Foal Eagle’)
or South Korea’s unification policy – which hints that their government is also
gearing up for sudden changes in North Korea – serve as the most prominent
examples of such expectations and scenarios of collapse. However, while North
Korea for many years now has stubbornly refused to perish, in passing proving
wrong the persistent predictions about its demise, it is important to note that the
internal situation of North Korea – or, to put it differently, its terms of living and
issues of everyday life – are highly relevant to questions of international peace,
security and stability.
In recent years, many articles and monographs have been published that are
centred around attempts to describe daily life in North Korea. Besides the numer-
ous publications by former North Korean refugees and defectors, telling of their
personal histories and experiences (for example, Kang et al. 2007; Kang/Rigoulot
2001; Lee 1999), prominent examples are The Hidden People in North Korea by
Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh (2009), Andrei Lankov’s (2007) essay collection
North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea and Nothing to Envy:
Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick
(2010) (see also, Cumings 2004; Haggard/Noland 2007; Harris 2007; Hunter
1999; Jenkins/Frederick 2008; Kim M 2010; Kim Y 2009; Martin 2006; Moeskes
2009; Myers 2010; United States Senate 2003).
In this regard, it is interesting to note that former US President George W.
Bush, who famously referred to North Korea as a part of the ‘axis of evil’ in his
2002 State of the Union address, identified the story of a North Korean refugee as
‘[o]ne of the most influential books I read during my presidency’ (Bush 2010: 422).
Referring to Kang Chol-hwan’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang (Kang/Rigoulot
2001), which recounts his internment and abuse in a North Korean prison camp,
Bush explains in his memoirs that Kang’s story ‘stirred up my deep disgust for
the tyrant who had destroyed so many lives, Kim Jong-il’ (Bush 2010: 422).
Impressed by Kang’s account, Bush recommended it to the Secretary of State and
other high-ranking policy advisors. In June 2005 Bush invited Kang to the White
House where he also met Vice-President Dick Cheney and National Security
Advisor Stephen J. Hadley (Brooke 2005b). Three months later Kang met then
Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom, Jack Straw, where both, as in the
meeting with Bush, discussed Kang’s experience in the prison camp and the
political situation surrounding North Korea (Christian Solidarity Worldwide
2005). Expressing his abhorrence about Kang’s imprisonment, Straw empha-
sized that, ‘we share a common goal in attempting to raise the international
awareness of the human rights abuses taking place there’ (Christian Solidarity
Worldwide 2005).
While the example of Kang and the above-mentioned body of work suggest
a growing interest in, and availability of, accounts of everyday life – which
also defies the notion that the outside world does not know very much about
North Korea – they coincide with increasing political commitments made and
international attention turned in recent years towards the situation and security
of ‘ordinary’ North Koreans. While human rights organizations and humanitar-
ian aid institutions have, ever since, pointed to the living and food conditions
of the North Korean people, more recent examples include the enactment of
special laws, the appointment of special emissaries or the growing international
Seeing on the ground 59
condemnation of North Korea’s human rights violations by both individual
national governments and international bodies.2
For instance, since the early 2000s United Nations bodies such as the General
Assembly or the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have regu-
larly condemned North Korea for its human rights record. In 2004, UN members
created the post of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights
in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, thereby institutionalizing interna-
tional concern for the people of North Korea. In the same year, the US govern-
ment adopted the so-called North Korean Human Rights Act, which has provided
a legal framework for humanitarian assistance towards the people of North
Korea. Intended to facilitate legal processes and assistance for North Koreans
who have already fled North Korea, the bill explicitly addresses, according to a
White House statement, ‘those who are trapped inside the country’ (White House
2004). The act also established, at the State Department, the Office of the Special
Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues.
Since a revision of the Act in 2008, the post of the special envoy has attained
full ambassadorial status, essentially meaning the structural upgrading of
the topic in question. In a round-table discussion about the release of the
State Department’s 2009 Human Rights Report, special envoy Robert King
announced, in March 2010, that the US government would include North Korea’s
human rights situation in the so-called Six-Party Talks that are aimed at the de-
nuclearization of the Korean peninsula (Hwang 2010). Consisting of China,
both Koreas, Japan, Russia and the United States, the Six-Party Talks have
reached an impasse after North Korea began to boycott the multilateral security
framework in April 2009, in response to the condemnation by the UN Security
Council of its rocket launch. However, the policy approach of the US govern-
ment highlights how the living conditions and issues of everyday life of
the North Korean people are increasingly being linked to the ‘high’ politics of
international security.
In 2006, Japan passed a similar bill related to North Korean human rights that
allows for the imposition of sanctions if no progress is made in this respect. The
South Korean government introduced in 2010 a draft law that, among other
things, calls for the appointment of an ambassador on human rights for North
Korea and for the protection of the North Korean people. In a major policy shift,
the South Korean government announced in December 2010 that it would seek
to make a greater distinction between the North Korean power elite and ordinary
North Korean citizens (Kim C 2010). Stressing the importance of improving the
living conditions for people in North Korea, Seoul’s Ministry of Unification said
that its policies would henceforth directly be aimed at the well-being of North
Korea’s citizens, so as ‘to induce desirable change’ (Kim C 2011b). In a recent
sign that the government is focusing outright on the North Korean people
and helping them on a personal level, the South Korean Defence Ministry, in
February 2011, for the first time since 2004, sent giant balloons containing daily
essentials – such as food, medicine and clothes – across the inter-Korean border
(Kim/Kim 2011).
A sociological study that was undertaken by the United States government in
the 1980s also underlines the fact that the issue of everyday life in North Korea
is of sufficient importance to be a matter of national security to a foreign state.
Originally written for the US intelligence community, the book of Helen-Louise
Hunter (1999) – then a East Asia analyst at the CIA – was declassified and pub-
lished in 1999. Hunter’s Kim Il-song’s North Korea reveals the special interest,
investments and efforts made by the US administration to convey,
A feeling for what North Koreans are really like, how they raise their chil-
dren, how they feel about the work they do, the limited leisure they have, the
political study sessions that dominate their lives and the compulsory,
so-called volunteer labor they perform, how they felt about Kim Il-song,
how they see their country today, and what their hopes are for the future.
(Hunter 1999: xvi)
In sum, what these examples indicate is a shift and widening of the policy
approaches towards North Korea so as to integrate the concern for human secu-
rity into political strategies and in order to put the well-being and issues of eve-
ryday life at the centre of immediate international attention (see also, Kim MK
2012). They document the growing problematization of North Korea’s living
conditions, showing that questions of everyday life have come to have political
implications. The increasing awareness about, and calling of attention to, the
situation and security of these people points to the growing significance of North
Korean everyday issues for international politics. It is precisely through this lens
that the following discussion of photographic essays, which claim to provide
insights into daily life in North Korea, should be viewed.
Furthermore, because these issues have increasingly become a pressing secu-
rity concern it is crucial to ask how the outside world gets an idea of what it
means to live, reside and be in North Korea. While notions and representations
of everyday life there have mainly been shaped by verbal and written accounts of
journalists, scholars, travellers and former refugees, it is also important to take
into consideration the power of visual depictions: people come to know life in
North Korea not only by written reports and books, but also by the act of looking
at the available images thereof. To address issues of everyday life also has ethical
dimensions, because such engagements help us to understand its people better
and thus potentially (re)assess our stance towards them.
Seeing is believing: imag(in)ing everyday life in North Korea

As noted, many books have recently been published that focus on attempts to
describe life in North Korea (for example, Demick 2010; Hassig/Oh 2009;
Lankov 2007). Alongside video footage, illustrated books and solitary news pic-
tures, the photographic essay seems to have emerged as one of the primary forms
of representation in the visual depiction of life in this country. Supportive of this
view are the many recent publications that were either produced by, or appeared
in, major international media outlets and global news agencies – such as the
Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Time, Life and Newsweek.
Recalling briefly insights from the preceding chapter on how to discuss images,
the arrangement of single pictures into a meaningful sequence (as happens with
photo essays) helps to convey a particular and coherent narrative to the reader by
extending the notion of photography – which is the production of images – to
something similar to writing or storytelling (Marien 2002: 57). In conjunction
with text and titles, a series of visual fragments tells a story and evokes particular
interpretive and emotive responses with regard to what is shown in them. While
the selected photographic essays adhere to the genre of documentary photogra-
phy, a photographic practice that attempts to capture unbiased and neutral images
of particular issues, the genre’s claim to accuracy and precision cannot serve as
irrefutable referents of an unconditional objectivity, precisely because of the
interpretive and hence subjective dimension of photography. It has also been
noted that a photograph is not necessarily a mere reflection of ‘the’ reality, but is
rather an interpretation thereof – one which is based on an understanding of what
issues or which persons are entitled to representation. In this vein, the taking of
a picture with a specific motif (to the exclusion of other ones) is not an objective
documentation but rather a subjective decision, and is itself an interpretive
response to how particular issues, events and/or circumstances are imagined and
framed by the photographer. Photographs, hence, have to be construed as visual
imaginaries. Regardless of the ‘real’ intentions of the photographer, images serve
particular purposes that cannot be isolated from their subsequent analysis. As
Clarke admonishes,
We must remember that the photograph is itself the product of a photographer.

It is always the reflection of a specific point of view, be it aesthetic, polemi-
cal, political or ideological. One never ‘takes’ a photograph in any passive
sense. To ‘take’ is active. The photographer imposes, steals, recreates the
scene/seen according to a cultural discourse.
(Clarke 1997: 29, italics in original)
The selective nature of photography refers to its most powerful mechanism:

the logic of inclusion and exclusion. Because the frame of a photograph regulates
by definition (in)visibility – that is, what can be seen and shown – it determines
what is present or not to the viewer. By means of photography’s logic of inclusion
and exclusion, particular perspectives and readings can be emphasized and stabi-
lized, which can result in hegemonic visuality. The repetition of certain elements
and motifs over time and differing locations contributes to the establishment of
particular generic patterns that, ultimately, become the dominant means of por-
trayal. It is suggested that representations of life in North Korea tend to incorpo-
rate these generic features, by emphasizing certain themes of difference, distance
and otherness in and through the promulgated images. A prominent example of
this means of portrayal is the Foreign Policy photographic essay by Tomas van
Houtryve (2009a), discussed in detail below.
The appearance of North Korea in visual images can be associated with dis-
courses emanating from what can be called its ‘strength’ and its ‘weakness’; both
of these are considered eminent threats to regional and international peace and
security (cf. Shim/Nabers 2012). While North Korea’s ‘strength’ is predominantly
connected to its missile and nuclear programmes – and the feared proliferation of
related technologies – its ‘weakness’ is mainly resultant from its ever-present
political, economic and food crises. Images play an important role in these signi-
fications, making them part of the processes that continually situate North Korea
in the realm of global concern. Similar to the content of what is commonly pre-
sented in governmental, academic and/or journalistic accounts, visual represen-
tations of North Korea oscillate between the binary poles of a threatening or an
indigent ‘other’.
What is important to note is that these representations are indicative of
the ways in which images are employed to emphasize aspects of difference
and otherness. For instance, many visual depictions of everyday life in North
Korea prioritize similar representational patterns and selected key themes –
including bleakness, poverty, scarcity and isolation. Some examples of this pat-
tern are the pictures and photo series of the BBC’s ‘In Pictures: Life in
Poverty-stricken North Korea’ (Pescali 2009), the DailyNK’s ‘Pictures of North
Korea from 1996 to 2006’ (Shin JH 2006), The New York Times’ ‘Currency
Devaluation Increases Hardship for North Koreans’ (Du Bin 2010), and the
Joongang Daily’s ‘From the Streets of North Korea’ (2005a, 2005b). While such
representations portray life in North Korea in terms of a perpetual struggle, they
allow us to construe the reality of North Korea as the very antithesis – and,
hence, other – of modern globalization. As a result, these depictions further
cause us to assume that ordinary people in North Korea must be eager to be
liberated and that they must be expectantly awaiting freedom and prosperity;
assumptions that are extremely problematic, as a discussion in the conclud-
ing part will demonstrate. Generic representations also show that certain
elements – fostered through photography’s logic of inclusion and exclusion – are
repeated over and over again, indicating that the above-mentioned patterns reso-
nate far beyond national boundaries. The repetition of certain picture motifs
and elements that pervade many of the photographic depictions of North Korea
contribute to the establishment and entrenchment of a form of visuality that is
hegemonic in nature.
Bearing in mind the elevated authority of photography to speak about and
make knowable particular issues – especially with regard to the unknown –
images of North Korea perform a defining function in terms of delineating who
its people are, what they do and how they live. In this vein, photography is not a
neutral activity but is profoundly political, which – via the logic of inclusion and
exclusion – consequently influences and intervenes in the conceptual processes
by which ‘we’ situate ourselves in relation to ‘them’. As images determine who
or what gets to be seen by an outside audience, important questions that need to
be raised are who or what remains inside and outside of the frame of visibility,
and with what effects.
Examining hegemonic visuality

A good example of those who are rendered almost invisible in photographic
(media) representations of North Korea is smiling or joyful people there. In this
regard, a photographic essay entitled ‘The Land of No Smiles’ by the American
magazine Foreign Policy is a case-in-point (van Houtryve 2009a).3 Using the
images of photographer Tomas van Houtryve, the seven-part photo series –
captioned consecutively ‘Canary Underground’, ‘Uneasy Street’, ‘Shop Girl’,
‘Collective Commute’, ‘Emergency Capitalism’, ‘Billboard Hit’, ‘Cult of
Personality’ – appeared in 2009 in Foreign Policy’s paper and internet editions,
thereby being circulated to a wide audience. While working for the photo agency
Panos Pictures – which, according to its own statements, works to address global
social issues – van Houtryve took his North Korea pictures during two trips to the
country in 2007 and 2008. Aside from the publication of his pictures in Foreign
Policy, a selection of his work has also recently appeared in Time, Life, VII The
Magazine, the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the French magazine La Vie. Some
of his North Korean pictures appear in his book Behind the Curtains, which fea-
tures a foreword by well-known philosopher Tzvetan Todorov. For this book van
Houtryve was awarded the 2012 ‘World Understanding Award’ in the Pictures of
the Year International contest. Initially, van Houtryve’s North Korea images were
also marked for publication in the Korean-language edition of Foreign Policy, but,
according to the magazine’s Sales and Marketing Manager, Randolph Manderstam,
the ‘price from the photographer to reprint the article was too steep for them
[Foreign Policy Korea]’ (Foreign Policy email inquiry 3 December 2010).
Van Houtryve was awarded several international photography prizes, winning,
for instance, the prestigious 2010 Photographer of the Year award and the 2011
Award of Excellence in the category of General News, again from Picture of the
Year International. The photo essay of Foreign Policy was nominated by the
American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), ‘a principal organization for
magazine journalists in the United States’, for the renowned National Magazine
Awards in the category of photo-journalism (from the ASME website). Even
though van Houtryve was not ultimately awarded the prize, the nomination
itself – along with the above-mentioned examples that show the wide dissemina-
tion of his North Korea photographs – points to the fact that the acclamation and
social recognition of such images rests on the understanding that they function as
informative photographic documentations of daily life in North Korea (another
recent example is the already mentioned book Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in
North Korea by Barbara Demick).
Foreign Policy itself was the winner of the 2003, 2007 and 2009 National
Magazine Awards prize for General Excellence (Calderone 2009). Foreign Policy
is an American bi-monthly magazine that was founded in 1970 by, among others,
Samuel P. Huntington. As a judge of the 2009 National Magazine Awards com-
mission put it, ‘Foreign Policy is an essential modern guide to global politics,
economics, and ideas for people who want to know what’s really happening in an
increasingly complicated world’ (see Foreign Policy website). Initially launched
as an academic quarterly, Foreign Policy evolved in the 1990s to become instead
a glossy magazine. Its online edition is host to the blog of, among others, neoreal-
ist/conservative scholars such as Stephen M. Walt and Daniel W. Drezner. It also
provides a conservative critique of the Obama administration (‘Shadow
Government’), which consists of scholars and practitioners who served in the
George W. Bush government – with some members advising Republican John
McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign (see Foreign Policy website).
Van Houtryve’s North Korean images were also displayed at several exhibitions
in France and Spain in 2009, and were the subject of two radio interviews that he
gave to the BBC World Service and National Public Radio (from the personal
website of van Houtryve). For Time, he authored a three-part series on his travels
to North Korea (van Houtryve 2009c, d, e). According to van Houtryve, the photo
essay in Foreign Policy was circulated widely in the internet, receiving more than
400,000 views during the first few days of its publication. The mere site of publi-
cation, which, as is indicated in Foreign Policy’s online statement, addresses
issues of foreign affairs and international relations, imposes a political and inter-
national dimension to van Houtryve’s North Korean images. This link is a good
example of how almost all issues pertaining to North Korea – even (representa-
tions of) its ordinary daily life – are increasingly elevated and construed as
belonging to the larger questions of global politics. The everyday and its visual
representation, hence, has become a site of great geopolitical importance.
The prominence and appreciation of the Foreign Policy photo essay and the
North Korea images taken by Tomas van Houtryve not only point to a greater
demand for such images, but warrant and justify a thorough discussion so as to
examine what exactly images do and how they are put to work. Van Houtryve’s
extensive accounts of his journey to North Korea also provide useful insights into
the ways in which both photo-journalists and their profession work. While these
pictures serve as an important case study of what is at stake in the imaging of
North Korea, the discussion will also be complemented and contrasted with other
photographic works.
Structure
The photo essay begins, in its introductory notes (Figure 3.1), with the reiteration
of the widespread belief that seeing pictures of North Korea is something unusual
and special. The accompanying text states that van Houtryve took ‘arresting pho-
tographs of Pyongyang and its people – images rarely captured and even more
rarely distributed in the West’ (van Houtryve 2009a). While countless profes-
sional and private photo series, travel reports and illustrated books suggest that
exactly the opposite is actually true – namely, that an enormous body of images
already exists – the very claim to be exhibiting rare images attributes them with
a unique value and authority because, as the introducing caption remarks, ‘[t]hey
show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world’s last gulag’ (ibid.).4
The photo series attempts to offer something that its viewers (in the West)
barely have, or are at least presumed to be lacking: knowledge about, and insight
Figure 3.1 ‘The Land of No Smiles’

Acknowledgement: Image courtesy of Dennis Brack (Foreign Policy).
into, what is called ‘The Land of No Smiles’. While the intended target audience
might be described as being from ‘the West’, because the introductory text states
that these images are ‘rarely captured and even more rarely distributed in the
West’, the circulation of this photo essay in, for instance, Chinese, South Korean
and Japanese internet portals shows that the viewership cannot actually be said
to be restricted to a supposed ‘Western’ domain.
Because the photo essay orders single images into a narrative sequence, it pro-
vides a coherent and comprehensible framework for the understanding of the story
to be told. The sequence of van Houtryve’s photo essay entails a narrative struc-
ture equivalent to that of travel writing, following a linear pattern of beginning
(Pyongyang), middle (Kaesong) and end (Pyongyang): the arrangement of the
pictures visually illustrates his journey starting with a photo taken in Pyongyang
(‘Uneasy Street’), dropping by in Kaesong (‘Emergency Capitalism’) and ending
with the return to the capital with an image showing the ‘main road back into
Pyongyang’ (‘Billboard Hit’). In this way, the photo essay is embedded in a sequen-
tial order that enhances its narrative function.
The heading of the Foreign Policy photo series (‘The Land of No Smiles’) not
only suggests what it is impossible to see in North Korea – happy or cheerful
people – it also determines how the subsequent images have to be read: life in
North Korea is characterized solely by distress, depression and desperation.
The pictures, which are predominantly dark and colourless (see ‘Canary Under-
ground’, ‘Uneasy Street’, ‘Shop Girl’, ‘Collectivist Commute’ and ‘Cult of
Personality’), portray scenes of static passivity rather than of dynamic activity.
The question of what the people in these pictures do can be answered with the
caption from the third image of the photo essay titled ‘Shop Girl’: ‘[t]he clerk sits
in the dark, unheated special store, waiting to turn on the lights for foreigners’.5
The people who appear in the photographs mostly do not show any major signs
of activity: they wait, sit or stand. One picture (‘Emergency Capitalism’) points
to what North Koreans do: they work ‘on an assembly line, packaging shirts by
the American brand K-Swiss’; but, as van Houtryve notes, even that appears to
be illegal.6
The first picture of the essay (‘Canary Underground’) is striking in terms of the
pinpoint focus on colour, and the (visual) contrast that is generated as a result.
While the image, showing people taking an escalator downstairs, is mainly dom-
inated by black and grey colours, the yellow bouquet of the woman in the middle
differs strongly from the cool and sombre setting of the picture. The enactment
of contrast in images (for example, strong/weak, full/empty, single-coloured/
multi-coloured) is a common method utilized in the visual representation of
North Korea.7 The second picture (‘Uneasy Street’) is another example of this
contrastive practice being used. According to the picture’s caption, van Houtryve
arrived in Pyongyang ‘during a normal work week in February’ finding ‘its main
thoroughfare entirely empty’. Apart from his personal assessment (‘Nobody’s out,
no couples with babies, nobody taking a walk’, ‘You could wait 10 minutes before
you ever saw a car’), the text continues by notifying us that ‘North Korea has just
a few hundred thousand cars for more than 20 million people’. Both image and
text are employed to create a moment of paradox, achieved by contrasting the
number of cars and paved roads (‘The country has only 1,000 miles of paved
roads’) with the country’s population.8
Effects
It is relatively easy to ascertain that the visual and verbal emphasis on the depleted
street setting of ‘Uneasy Street’ evokes a sense of emptiness, distance and for-
lornness – not only because of the compositional structure of the image with the
wide blank road, leading almost to nowhere, and the monotonous colour setting, but
also because of what the viewer presumably would expect from witnessing, as is
highlighted, the capital’s ‘main thoroughfare’ ‘during a normal work week’.
In other words, the alienation conveyed by the image results from the emphasis
on building a contrast between the ‘entirely empty’ main road of Pyongyang with
the viewer’s imagination of how a street scene in a capital city should actually
look. Major cities – the preceding image ‘Canary Underground’ estimates
Pyongyang’s population ‘at up to 3 million’ – are usually associated with vibrant,
colourful and multi-faceted street life, packed with people and traffic, especially
if they are capitals (‘Pyongyang, the North Korean capital’) – which are typically
representative of the political, economic and cultural centre of a country. None
of these characteristics can be seen in the picture(s) that makes the setting,
according to the title, an ‘Uneasy Street’. The same contrasting logic applies to
the picture ‘Shop Girl’, in which a particular case (‘This is shopping in North
Korea. The clerk sits in the dark, unheated special store’) is presented in opposi-
tion to the presumed expectations of the viewer.
The depiction and description of, in particular, empty roads, highways and
sites – stressing either no cars or no people, or both – appears to be a well-adopted
photographic motif by foreigners in North Korea; it is one that seems to be
prevalent regardless of whether they are originally from China, Japan, Russia or
the United States. While the imaging of this kind of void – empty streets, deserted
places and desolate spaces – can be countered through looking at other accounts
and visuals that contradict this prevailing perspective, as will be discussed in
further detail in due course, it suggests that there is a particular awareness of
what is both believed to be worth mentioning in the first place and what is not.
In this respect, these images mirror the logic of inclusion and exclusion that are
at play in the present case. Representations – verbal or visual – always entail
questions of what and how to prioritize and emphasize.
For instance, the empty street setting is not surprising given that the picture, as
is stated in the caption, was taken during the winter season in February; accord-
ing to the World Meteorological Organization of the United Nations, this is the
second coldest month of the year in North Korea. From this viewpoint, it appears
fairly reasonable and logical that people – for instance ‘couples with babies’, as
van Houtryve mentions in ‘Uneasy Street’ – tend to stay away from being out-
doors as far as possible. Further, what the caption of ‘Uneasy Street’ does not
mention is that the picture, according to van Houtryve’s personal website, was
taken on a Sunday, which in North Korea is a day of rest and which would also
explain why he did not encounter many people. The omission of this information,
whether deliberate or not, is a good example of how accompanying texts struc-
ture the interpretation and the reading of images. As previously noted, captions
contextualize images and can prioritize specific aspects that the photographer
wishes to convey, which are important for their subsequent reading – and so that
a new meaning is therein constructed.
The accompanying text of the image ‘Collectivist Commute’ reinforces the
essay’s theme of generating distance and difference through a logic of inclusion
and exclusion. The caption explains that, ‘[w]hen van Houtryve approached
North Koreans, they walked off or averted their eyes. He never once photo-
graphed a smile. Even children ran away from him’ (van Houtryve 2009a).
Van Houtryve adds that, ‘[t]hey’d turn and notice me and immediately bolt off –
as if a wolf had come up to them’ (ibid.).9
The observation about supposedly dismissive North Koreans that is made in
van Houtryve’s photo series is not an uncommon refrain among many of the
visitors to North Korea. In his illustrated book The Last Paradise, photo-journalist
Nicolas Righetti similarly notes that,
Apart from my guide, in the street nobody speaks to me. When I am alone,
no one establishes contact; no one seems to pay any attention to me. Life
goes on as if I did not exist. Not even the police or soldiers take the risk of
approaching me. Fear imbues us all.
(Righetti 2003)
Dermot Tatlow (2004), another photo-journalist, comments that people in

North Korea, ‘keep away from foreigners, especially ones with cameras and, if
approached, they quickly scurry away.’
What these excerpts suggest is that the difficulty of establishing contact
between visitors and locals in North Korea is due to anxiety and reluctance on the
part of North Korean people: ‘they [the North Koreans] walked off or averted
their eyes [. . .] even children ran away from him’ (van Houtryve), ‘nobody
speaks to me [. . .] no one establishes contact’ (Righetti), ‘they scurry away’
(Tatlow). While these brief accounts contest the thesis of a neutral, observer-only
photographer – one who provides undistorted glimpses of the real as per the
stance that is usually claimed by such documentary photographers – they point
to important aspects that are worthy of more detailed analysis.
For instance, the limited contact is explained by most North Korea analysts on
political grounds, according to which ordinary North Korean citizens are prohib-
ited from approaching foreigners. Putting aside the likelihood that these North
Korean people could at that time of that day have simply been demonstrating
(non-political) human indifference towards them, the question could also be
posed the other way round: why should North Koreans approach strangers hold-
ing a camera, who, presumably, do not speak their language, but nevertheless
attempt to talk to and photograph them? Why should North Koreans let foreign
photographers, who stick a camera in their face, come close to them? It could also
be asked what right these ‘parachuting’ photo-journalists have to capture others
for close scrutiny, and to depict and speak for people that they do not know and
who obviously did not give them permission to do so? Shortly, it will be shown
that similar behaviour has previously been considered intrusive and offensive
elsewhere – thus demonstrating that the described reaction is not an exceptional
or peculiar feature of North Korean citizens, but is an all too human response.
One effect of this kind of photography is to imply a form of hierarchical vision,
in which these people are depicted as those who are not actively looking, but who
are, rather, to be looked at. The implicit assumption that they have to be uncon-
ditionally available in order to be pictured, looked at and displayed to/for a wider
public, is reminiscent of voyeuristic practices prevalent, for instance, in zoologi-
cal parks: something is captured and exhibited for the visual consumption and
entertainment of an external audience. In general, linguistic references to voyeur-
ism are widespread in visual portrayals of (daily life in) North Korea. Usually
stigmatized as surreptitious or inappropriate looking, because they connote the
lack of mutual permission and the violation of a code of social conduct, voyeur-
istic practices – peeking and peering, glimpsing and staring – are, however, taken
to be acceptable in the capturing and representation of North Korea and its peo-
ple. As a result, the penetrating and intruding gaze of a voyeur, something that
people would normally consider rude and offensive, has been transformed into
a legitimate mode of witnessing and depiction in the case of North Korea and its
inhabitants.
In order to be perceived as human, the logic of inclusion/exclusion and visibility/
invisibility point here to the ethical considerations in representing North Korea
in photographic works. The way that North Korea, its people and the life within
are visually brought to us defines who they are: as odd and frightened victims
who ‘immediately bolt off – as if a wolf had come up to them’ (van Houtryve
2009a). Photography reveals here its references to ethnography and anthropology,
as visual images function to describe the nature of those who are pictured and
permit the making of profound statements about the current state of their lives.
As a result, questions of (in)visibility set the conditions under which certain
groups of people can be granted either equal or unequal status as human beings.
Implicated in such representations are not only questions of (absent) subjectivity
and agency on the part of the viewed but also on the part of the viewer. As several
scholars have argued, images of suffering and misery that are taking place else-
where in the world can function as ‘reminders of what we [the viewers] are free
from’ (Levi Strauss 2003: 81). While images of North Korea that tend to portray
despair and desolation evoke pity or compassion on the part of the viewer, it also
provides him or her with a secure and safe position away from the remote, alien
scene where the pictures were taken. Bleiker and Kay (2007: 151) argue that
depictions of suffering can become a means of affirming life in ‘the safe here and
now, giving people a sense of belonging to a particular group that is distinct from
others’. While such images are synonymous with the affirmation of the self as a
member of a particular group (Biehl 2001: 139), it shows how questions of sub-
jectivity are embroiled in ways of seeing (see also, Sontag 2005).
The photo essay published in Foreign Policy is interesting for an additional
reason besides. While the introductory remarks mention that van Houtryve took
photographs of ‘Pyongyang and its people’, the headline ‘The Land of No Smiles’
indicates a synecdochic relationship between image, text and title, in which the
nature of the whole (‘Land’) is inferred by the visual representation of the part(s)
(‘Pyongyang’ and ‘Kaesong’). As the introduction adds, ‘They [the images]
show stark glimmers of everyday life in the world’s last gulag’. As such, the ways
in which particular scenes in these pictures (the ‘glimmers’) are made visible
function as synecdochic referents that come to represent the whole of North
Korea (‘everyday life in the world’s last gulag’).
Synecdoches serve the function of providing a narrow and simplified under-
standing of what is substituted – their referential function allows the use of one
entity (part) to stand for another (whole). In this vein, these concepts affect the
thoughts, attitudes and actions of people through the accentuating of particular
elements or fragments, and by sidelining others (Lakoff/Johnson 1980: 35–40).
The synecdochic structure of the photo essay simplifies the imaginative leap and
interpretive effort that the viewer is left to make, because the connecting and
transference of particular qualities (for example, the cold, sombre atmosphere)
appears to be natural (cf. Chandler 2007: 126–39). The viewer almost cannot but
draw the conclusion that the whole (‘The Land of No Smiles’) proceeds in the
same way as the part (Pyongyang), which is the result of the interplay between
images and accompanying text. The way that viewers of these images are permit-
ted to see, via the synecdochic structure of the photo essay, affects the conditions
under which they think or know about things that are going on in North Korea.
This is possible because seeing is employed as a way of knowing. Generally, as
other parts could also have been chosen to stand for – to symbolize – the whole,
synecdochic representations always involve a selective dimension. In this regard,
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980: 36) note that, ‘which part we pick out
determines which aspect of the whole we are focusing on’. In other words, a par-
ticular characteristic becomes the signifier of a totality.
Narrative
Concerning the (contextual) question of how van Houtryve’s North Korea pictures
came about, and what was involved in his actions, it is pertinent to refer to his
travel accounts, which, along with a photo essay entitled, ‘Rare Pictures from
Inside North Korea’, appeared as a three-part series in the internet edition of
Time magazine. In his travel reports, ‘Journey to North Korea, Part I: Majesty
and the Mustache’ (van Houtryve 2009c), ‘Journey to North Korea, Part II: The
Pack-Rat Dictatorship’ (van Houtryve 2009d) and ‘Journey to North Korea,
Part III: NoKo Chocolate Factory’ (van Houtryve 2009e), van Houtryve provides
background information about his two trips to North Korea, which took place in
August 2007 and February 2008 respectively.
The reader learns how van Houtryve managed to enter North Korea at one
point by, as the introductory text in Time notes, ‘infiltrating a communist solidar-
ity delegation’ (van Houtryve 2009c), and, on another occasion, by pretending to
be a Belgian businessman looking to establish a chocolate factory (see also, the
Foreign Policy photo essay by van Houtryve 2009a). In general, his narrative
tells of three things: how he successfully entered North Korea – ‘I had to play the
system’ (van Houtryve 2009c); what he did and what he experienced there –
‘I was shooting different angles, moving my lens like a pro’ (van Houtryve
2009c) and ‘Suddenly, the electricity cut out [at the mausoleum of Kim Il-sung]
[. . .] we were plunged into darkness. For 10 minutes, nobody said a word. And
when the lights came back on, there was no acknowledgement, no apology and
no explanation’ (van Houtryve 2009d); and, what he thinks of what he saw or
where he went – ‘The visual texture of North Korea is different from any country
on earth. It is stark and bizarre to the point of being surreal [. . .] it’s like an empty
movie set’ (van Houtryve 2009c).
The enormous effort that van Houtryve put into his entry into North Korea –
a behaviour that is not untypical for more than a few journalists and
photographers10 – are worth quoting in more detail. As he recalls,
I’ve visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) twice, in

2007 and 2008, and each time I had to do some elaborate fabricating of my
own. [. . .] I knew that getting a visa was out of the question if I identified
myself truthfully [as a photo-journalist]. [. . .] To get more than a tour of the
dictator’s diorama – to develop even a hint of knowledge about real life in
North Korea – I had to play the system. At the height of the Cold War, soli-
darity delegations allowed loyal party members to visit sister countries
within the communist bloc. The trusted cadres were given special access to
visit model schools, hospitals and farms. A few far-left organizations have
kept this tradition alive today by organizing friendship brigades to Cuba and
North Korea. By fabricating my identity – I grew a mustache, changed my
hair and clothes, adopted a foreign accent and got a second passport from a
small, inoffensive European country [Belgium] – one of these groups let me
in. I got my visa.
(van Houtryve 2009c)
On his second trip to North Korea, van Houtryve notes that,
On the final day of my first trip to North Korea [in 2007], my guides reached
out to me. ‘We are trying very hard to get investors into the DPRK.’ They
asked me to recruit people at home interested in doing business in North
Korea. I already had an exclusive set of photos from inside hospitals, schools
and even Pyongyang’s elite military academy. But the idea of being the first
Western photographer to visit a North Korean factory was very tempt-
ing. I asked for a list of industries where Korea was looking for foreign
investment. One of them, chocolate, sounded particularly strange for a coun-
try never far from the brink of starvation. After I left Pyongyang, I began
searching for a journalist willing to pose as a chocolate consultant. Eventually
I found Antoine Dreyfus, a reporter for a French weekly. He would travel to
North Korea under the pretext of doing a market study for the confectionery
industry. I would return to Pyongyang with him, playing his assistant with a
background in product marketing. We studied chocolate production and
assembled props: a fake business website, false business cards, product cata-
logues and samples. In February [2008] I was back in Pyongyang.
(van Houtryve 2009e)
Such accounts are particularly interesting, and not only because of the insights
that they reveal into what certain (photo-)journalists are willing to do for a ‘good
story’ (‘I grew a mustache, changed my hair and clothes, adopted a foreign accent
and got a second passport from a small, inoffensive European country’, ‘We stud-
ied chocolate production and assembled props: a fake business website, false
business cards, product catalogues and samples’). For implicated in the actions of
van Houtryve are other salient points as well; in this regard, it is important to
reveal how his narrative of how he tricked the North Korea system functions
(for example, ‘I had to play the system’, van Houtryve 2009c) – that is, what
the narrative does in being told this way. In his statements and photographs,
van Houtryve evokes particular notions of difference and otherness with regard
to North Korea. For instance, besides highlighting that Pyongyang is ‘surely
the most isolated capital city on earth’, he testifies that ‘the visual texture of
North Korea is different from any country on earth. It is stark and bizarre to the
point of being surreal’ (van Houtryve 2009c). He proceeds to observe that, as
in the Foreign Policy photo essay, cars and pedestrians are almost absent, which
makes Pyongyang seem ‘like an empty movie set’ (ibid.). While the intention
here is not to debate or question the truthfulness of such characterizations, which
are widespread among North Korea visitors, it is interesting to note that, given
his own elaborate efforts at acting and posing in order to get into the country,
he makes himself part of the very setting that he desperately attempted to enter,
and afterwards judges as a façade.
To put it differently, his narrative and images can only function as objective
referents on the basis of the assumption that he has attained a privileged point of
view by fooling the North Korean state apparatus; an exceptional position that
allows him to take ‘arresting photographs of Pyongyang and its people’, as stated
in the Foreign Policy photo essay (van Houtryve 2009a); or, to get ‘an extraor-
dinarily unfiltered view of life inside the reclusive Asian nation’, as noted in
the photo series in Time (van Houtryve 2009b). This privileged point of view
places the photographer outside of what is being described and pictured, thus
endowing his visual and verbal perspectives with authority. The way that his
extra-discursive position is mediated – for example, ‘unfiltered view’, ‘despite
24-hour surveillance by North Korean minders, he took arresting photographs’,
‘by infiltrating a communist solidarity delegation’, ‘by posing as a businessman’
(van Houtryve 2009a, c) – helps to construct him as an objective bystander and
conceals what he actually is – an embedded tourist, traveller and active partici-
pant. Critical work on (the politics of) travel and travel writing has previously
suggested that travellers are enclosed in politically-saturated structures (see, for
instance, Brisson 2009; Lisle 2006). However, travelling, and its main compan-
ion photography, are not neutral activities because travellers’ imaginations and
values are reasserted and projected, for instance, in the form of what and how to
take picture of ‘foreign’ realms. As many passages in his accounts suggest – for
instance, the reactions to him photographing or to his fake business activities –
he is not an innocent observer who has no impact on the environment that he
seeks to capture but is, rather, actively intervening in his surroundings.
The way that his photo story is told resembles the fight of David versus
Goliath: here a single individual faces and, eventually, outwits the apparatus of
the North Korean regime. The narrative style not only makes him the protagonist
of the story, as a result of the first-person account, but also gives his actions both
legitimacy and courage. The reference to Euna Lee and Laura Ling – two
American journalists who were captured at the Chinese–North Korean border
and later pardoned in 2009, two years after van Houtryve visited North Korea for
the first time – fits with the function of this narrative, which seemingly makes
van Houtryve a heroic and commendable individual because he has proven his
resistance, cleverness and craftsmanship – where others have failed – in the
confrontation with a superior power and adverse conditions: he successfully
tricked both his minders and the North Korean system at large.11 As he states,
‘like Euna Lee and Laura Ling, I am an American and a journalist, a combination
that makes reporting about North Korea perilous’ (van Houtryve 2009c). As a
consequence, the choice and means of his actions are justified given the danger
and challenges that he has managed to overcome.
Both in the accounts of van Houtryve in Time and in the introductory note
to the Foreign Policy photo essay, the North Korean counterparts are exclusively
referred to as ‘minders’. While the monitoring function, which is often emphasized
by foreign visitors in North Korea, is certainly correctly mentioned and is not
questioned here, it should be pointed out that, because of his (and probably many
other visitors’) complete lack of knowledge about local venues and the native
language, van Houtryve relies on his North Korean counterparts for reasons
of interpreting, orientation, personal safety and travel planning – making his
‘minders’ also ‘tour guides’, ‘interpreters’ or even ‘fellows’. In other words, van
Houtryve’s linguistic and cultural isolation would be even further aggravated
without his North Korean companions.
Ethics
While there are some hints of hedonism and self-aggrandizement in his accounts –
‘the idea of being the first Western photographer to visit a North Korean factory
was very tempting’ (van Houtryve 2009e) – the behaviour of van Houtryve can
be taken to resemble what might be described in strictly legal terms as fraudulent
intent. From this perspective, he gains – under false pretences – benefits that he
would not otherwise have been able to obtain, through the faking of his identity.
As he notes, ‘I knew that getting a visa was out of the question if I identified
myself truthfully’. As a result, his two visits to North Korea brought him accla-
mation (awards), social recognition (acknowledgement by peer photographers,
publishers and photo agencies) and significant financial revenues through the
publication of his North Korea images and stories in well-known media outlets or
books, as well as nominations for – and receipt of – prestigious press accolades.
It could further be said that van Houtryve takes advantage (or is even exploita-
tive) of the hospitality and kindness not only of his North Korean hosts but also
of the Belgian solidarity delegation that brought him in good faith to the country.
Van Houtryve (2009d) himself gives an example of how kindly he was received
in North Korea, by citing one of his guides, ‘we Koreans are a very open and
hospitable people. Look how we open our home and our hearts to you.’ Almost
anticipating van Houtryve’s questionable intentions, the guide is quoted as saying,
‘if ever we are betrayed, we take revenge on you and your family’ (ibid.).
The reference to van Houtryve’s extensive preparations and measures is
intended to highlight that he virtually acts in the very same way that the leader-
ship of North Korea is widely criticized, condemned and sanctioned in interna-
tional politics for: namely, on the basis of deception, falsification and insincerity.
It should, then, maybe not be a particular surprise that North Koreans – whether
part of the elites or not – have valid reasons to be wary and suspicious of the
intentions, actions and policies of external actors. In his landmark publication
Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea, Leon Sigal (1998)
shows that disingenuous behaviour is not necessarily a North Korean peculiarity
but also part and parcel of US policy and diplomacy towards Pyongyang (see also,
Sigal 2001; 2003; 2005; 2008). Rather than singling North Korea out for blame,
Sigal instead traces how the lack of trust on both sides – in Pyongyang and
Washington – hampered the tit-for-tat negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear
programme in the 1990s. He identifies a US policy pattern that repudiated political
rapprochement and, instead, fostered what he calls a ‘crime-and-punishment
approach’, precipitating the escalation of military tensions in the region (Sigal
1998). Bleiker (2001, 2003) argues in a similar fashion, by stating that the policy
responses and actions of North Korea – also known as ‘coercive diplomacy’,
‘nuclear brinkmanship’, ‘irrational behaviour’ or an ‘insincere attitude’ – could
be seen as (defensive) reactions to particular initiatives by successive US
governments – including the Nuclear Posture Review, the National Security
Strategy and the Proliferation Security Initiative, all of which are perceived as
being threatening by the North Korean leadership.
Pinkston and Saunders (2003) have also pointed out how deliberate distor-
tions and misrepresentations on the part of the United States have affected its
North Korea policy, by relying, for instance, on such ideological biases and
derogatory designations as ‘rogue state’, ‘axis of evil’ and ‘outpost of tyranny’
(see also, Gordy/Lee 2009). In examining US print media coverage of North
Korea, Hugh Gusterson (2008) shows that what is consequently widely regarded
as being deceptive behaviour by Pyongyang depends on how, for instance, its
obligations and commitments concerning an agreement are represented and
reported in the media.
Certainly, the allusion to the ethics of photography can put one at risk of
opening Pandora’s Box, and raises difficult questions concerning the adequacy,
validity and normativity of imaging: what should be pictured? How should sub-
jects be photographed? What is the adequate mode of representation? Do the
circumstances legitimate a particular behaviour? Do the surrounding conditions
warrant particular images? What are the ‘right’ circumstances that justify cer-
tain representational practices? Several codes of conduct articulated by many
national and international photography associations, newspapers and global
news agencies point to the need to embed particular ways of seeing into a frame-
work of ethics. For instance, to ensure the highest standards of visual journal-
ism, the US-based National Press Photographers’ Association formulated a code
of ethics to pursue ‘the faithful and comprehensive depiction of the subject at
hand’ (NPPA 2011). Besides advising photo-journalists to unequivocally treat
all subjects with dignity and respect, the NPPA Code of Ethics stipulates that,
among other things, they should be accurate and provide context when depict-
ing subjects and avoid making stereotypical representations of individuals and
groups.
It is reasonable to suggest that – pursuant to the logic that the end justifies the
means – certain circumstances require certain measures. As van Houtryve
explained in a personal response to the present interpretation:
As a general rule, I don’t think that journalists should use deception while
reporting nor should they lie to their subjects. On the other hand, we all
know that news gathering would be nearly useless and riddled with inaccu-
racies if it consisted only of relaying the viewpoint of governments and indi-
viduals who are trying to maintain their power, suppress dissent or hide
wrongdoing. [. . .] Ultimately, a more accurate understanding of North Korea
will only be possible if media restrictions are relaxed and a full range of
pluralistic viewpoints are allowed to report and publish. Until then, we have
to settle for partial and manipulated information or try to skirt around
restrictions.
(email inquiry 12 April 2011)
With caution, several points should be raised with regard to van Houtryve’s
remarks on ‘pluralistic viewpoints’ and a ‘more accurate understanding of
North Korea’. While one of the goals of this work is the promotion of multiple
perspectives and approaches in the representation of North Korea, therefore
easily complying with van Houtryve’s statement, it should again be stressed –
as outlined in Chapter 1 – that even the most comprehensive description is inevi-
tably partial, simply because reality cannot ever be captured in its entirety. An
account like a photograph or a photo series is always representing a part of a
whole, something which has been described above as synecdoche. Accounts –
both visual and verbal – are also inevitably biased, because of the subjective deci-
sion (of the photographer and/or of the editorial team) about what and how to
picture, as well as about what and how to subsequently publish it. The taking of
an image is, therefore, not a realistic reflection of reality by any means, but
merely an expression of an (individual and/or collective) interpretation of who or
what is deserving of representation in a particular way.
Further, van Houtryve’s reference to the restrictions that North Korean author-
ities have imposed on, for instance, foreign media journalists is certainly right
and is not questioned here. The citing of the constraints, however, not only func-
tions as a justification for such actions but, more importantly, suggests that this
way of behaving – pretending, faking, lying – is almost the only available option
to mediate and ensure an unregulated imaging and understanding of North
Korean affairs.
Several photographers have, however, shown that this is not necessarily the
case: Eric Lafforgue for the Boston Globe (2008), Jean H. Lee, Vincent Yu and
David Guttenfelder for the Associated Press (Lee 2010a; Lee/Guttenfelder 2011)
and Irina Kalashnikova for the Guardian (Kalashnikova 2010). These examples
indicate that the deception evidently practised by van Houtryve (as well as other
photographers who have behaved in a similar manner) is not a necessary evil in
the face of otherwise insurmountable external circumstances and obstacles, but is,
ultimately, rather a matter of personal choice and an individual decision.
Finally, if one of the ambitions of van Houtryve was to provide a non-official
perspective on, and foster an accurate understanding of, North Korea by skirting
around official restrictions, then in a certain way he failed, for two reasons: van
Houtryve himself is not even sure if his gaze remained fixed inside the govern-
ment’s frame of visibility. As he admitted in an interview with National Public
Radio, ‘it was very hard to tell; were we seeing the real North Korea or were
we seeing the North Korea that they want these [solidarity] delegations to see?’
(NPR 2009). But most importantly, and in contrast to other photographic
depictions of daily life in North Korea, his accounts emphasize particular
aspects – bizarreness, distress, desperation – that reinforce stereotypical views
and imaginations that are antagonistic to more pluralistic representations of
North Korea.
Photography and security

In his travel report, van Houtryve (2009d) considers one incident worthy of men-
tion. He recounts a pivotal moment from when he was taking pictures from his
tour bus, incidentally also of a facility that his North Korean guide later claimed
to have been a ‘secret military installation’. Shortly before, when van Houtryve
took pictures of the bronze statue of Kim Il-sung as part of his itinerary, he had
already aroused the suspicions of his guides. As he recalls,
By the time our bus arrived at a gargantuan bronze statue of the Great
Leader, where we were instructed to bow, I had begun to slip dangerously
out of character. I was shooting different angles, moving my lens like a pro.
The minders and other delegation members said nothing. But I should have
known that I was compromising my cover.
(van Houtryve 2009c)
As a consequence, van Houtryve had to fetch his memory cards and show his
guides every picture that he had taken, some of which were subsequently deleted.
This experience is not uncommon among North Korea visitors, as foreigners are
occasionally told to erase pictures with certain image motifs from their cameras.
Such scenes include, for instance, ‘negative’ or ‘unfavourable’ photographs of
poverty and distress as well as pictures of sensitive sites, objects and people –
such as military bases, weaponry and soldiers. As mentioned, this anxiety indi-
cates a politicization of the visual on the part of the North Korean government:
visitors are supposed to photograph only what they are allowed to see by North
Korean officials. In this way, the North Korean authorities are attempting to
regulate what Judith Butler has called the ‘field of perceptible reality’, a visual
perspective established by the state to orchestrate and ratify the extent of what
counts as reality (Butler 2009: 64, 66). However, while the attempt of the North
Korean state to control the visual field does not necessarily guarantee the ‘proper’
interpretation of images, the awareness – and wariness – of the authorities about
‘negative’ pictures reveals the power that is attributed to the visual to affect the
thoughts, attitudes and actions of people. Anticipating such an eventuality, van
Houtryve notes that he had developed a back-up system to copy and to conceal
the contents of his memory cards – so that he was able to retain all of the pictures
that he had already taken. In the end he was ‘given the benefit of the doubt’ and
eventually released (van Houtryve 2009d).
The issues at hand here will be best illustrated if the story is imagined the
other way round. While the episode shows that states seem to feel threatened by
visual images, it could be asked what the reactions of American (and South
Korean, Japanese) government hosts would have been if a North Korean visitor
disguised his identity – growing a moustache, changing his hair and clothes, get-
ting a second passport of another country with fake business cards, websites,
product catalogues and samples – and then entered their country with the spe-
cific purpose of documenting his interpretation of American reality. Further,
what would be the consequences if a North Korean journalist, who pretended
to be a member of a friendship association, photographed a building that a US
government minder asserted to be a secret facility of the US military? Another
question to ask is what are the (further) repercussions of this action for the work-
ing conditions now faced by foreign journalists in North Korea, which were
already characterized by suspicion and distrust, if the hosts have since learned
about van Houtryve’s real identity? (which certainly would not be unlikely given
the prominence and ongoing promotion of his images in the internet and other
media outlets).12
While it is relatively easy to determine that the filming or photographing of
military facilities would lead to being searched in any country of the world,
it should be noted that questions of vision and visuality seem to be, in general,
highly sensitive security issues within both domestic and international affairs.
A number of examples – ranging from protests by citizens and states against the
introduction of geospatial and geographical information services such as Google
Earth or Google Street View, to the increasing use of closed-circuit television
cameras in urban areas, to the regulation of visual imagery in wars and in
counter-terrorism legislation – demonstrate that ways of seeing and imaging are
accompanied by grave concerns, deep suspicions and political tensions. For
instance, several states – including India, Russia and South Korea – have strongly
protested against the detailed depiction of their territories by Google Earth.
Arguing that the exposure of sensitive sites could pose a threat to their national
security, they have demanded the removal or at least blurring of certain satellite
photographs. Many governments have also criticized Google’s geospatial Street
View service because of concerns that its panoramic images of streets and
residential areas could violate the private sphere of citizens. Construed in terms
of a threat to the right of privacy and a personal life, these anxieties show that
the fear of the gaze of an unknown other arises out of what is made visible by
such imagery.
Further, several British (photo-)journalists report that photographers in the
United Kingdom are at risk of being arbitrarily targeted as potential terrorists
under new counter-terrorism laws (Hughes/Taylor 2009; Lewis 2009; Vallée
2009). Regardless of whether they were domestic or foreign, amateur or profes-
sional, Paul Lewis (2009) recounts how photographers, including him, were
watched and searched by police officers under anti-terror legislation. It is telling
that two Austrian tourists, who visited the country’s capital in April 2009, were
forced to delete all photographs from their cameras related to public transporta-
tion after policemen stopped and searched them, citing the prevention of terror-
ism. The 69-year-old tourist and his 15-year-old son had been taking pictures
of some of London’s most iconic sights – including the famous red double-
decker buses and the city’s various bus and underground stations. After having
their passport numbers and hotel address recorded, they were told that photo-
graphing anything in relation to public transport was ‘strictly forbidden’ (Weaver/
Dodd 2009).
Also insightful are the remarks made by American photographer Christopher
Morris, whose photo series on North Korea, ‘Exposing North Korea’, appeared in
Time in 2005, and whose pictures, among others, were reused in a 2010 photo
essay (‘Inside North Korea – Five Photographers Reveal the World’s Most Secret
State’) by Life. As Morris notes,
In some ways, I’ve found photographing in America these days a lot more
restrictive than it was in North Korea. Try picking up your camera and just
start shooting at JFK airport, or in a subway in the States. People – and not
just the authorities, but regular people – do not like it.
(Life 2010: 22)
Besides shedding a different light on putatively dismissive North Koreans,

who allegedly fearfully turn away from strangers with cameras, both Morris
and the above-mentioned examples also point to the general sensitivity regarding
the relationship between sight, security and politics. The ability to make visible
people and places renders them not only accessible and knowable to unrelated
others, it also refers to the specific qualities of imaging – immediacy, ambiguity
and impact – that makes practices of looking deeply political.
What can be concluded from the discussion of the Foreign Policy photo essay
as well as of van Houtryve’s travel accounts is that, as result of the interplay
between images and texts, North Korea is depicted as a foreign, secluded and
dangerous place, where its people can only hope to escape from. As a result, we
expect people from North Korea to be awaiting liberation because North Korea
is imag(in)ed as a site that can only be abandoned; it exists outside of the modern
world, even outside of time, and is incapable of change and entrapped in an
eternal past. Represented in this way, it becomes clear what North Korea is not:
home – a special place of belonging that comprises the experiences, emotions,
values and social relationships that make up the very essence of being human
(cf. Gregory et al. 2009: 339). Keeping this in mind, other photographic essays
will be discussed that contradict this perspective.
Contesting hegemonic visuality

Recalling the selective character of photography, the logic of inclusion/exclusion
can also be used to produce images that construct total different ways of seeing.
One example is the reports and photographs of Associated Press Bureau Chief
in Seoul, Jean H. Lee, and AP photographer Vincent Yu, who both travelled –
on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers’
Party – to North Korea in October 2010 (see Figures 3.2 – 3.11). At this event,
Kim Jong-un – the third son of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, who was then
widely considered to be the country’s heir apparent – made his first major public
Figure 3.2 ‘A North Korean family have a picnic along the Taedong River’
Caption: A North Korean family have a picnic along the Taedong River in Pyongyang,
North Korea on Monday, 11 October, 2010. The party in Pyongyang stretched into Monday as
North Koreans took the day off to celebrate a major political anniversary and to revel in the
unveiling of leader Kim Jong Il’s heir-apparent, son Kim Jong Un (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.3 ‘North Korean dancers perform during a concert in Pyongyang’

Caption: North Korean dancers perform during a concert in Pyongyang, North Korea,
on Monday, 11 October, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.4 ‘Two North Korean women pose at a flower show in Pyongyang’
Caption: Two North Korean women pose at a flower show in Pyongyang,
North Korea on Monday, 11 October, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
appearance, in a move targeting both a domestic and a global audience. Images

of him should, it seems, play a crucial role in knowing him. A picture taken by Yu
that shows father and son together later won third prize in the 2010 World Press
Photo awards, in the category ‘People in the News’.
In their accounts, ‘A rare glimpse at a different side of North Korea’ and
‘Picnics and paddleboats as Pyongyang celebrates’, which appeared in, among
Figure 3.5 ‘North Koreans smile during a ride at a park’
Caption: North Koreans smile during a ride at a park in Pyongyang, North Korea on Monday,
11 October, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.6 ‘North Korean soldiers watch a concert in Pyongyang’

Caption: North Korean soldiers watch a concert in Pyongyang, North Korea on Monday,
11 October, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.7 ‘A North Korean man poses in front of a light box’
Caption: A North Korean man poses in front of a light box featuring a Kimjongilia flower during
a flower show in Pyongyang, North Korea on Monday, Oct. 11, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.8 ‘North Korean rowing boats’

Caption: North Korean rowing boats at the Taedong River in Pyongyang, North Korea on
Monday, Oct. 11, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.9 ‘A North Korean man plays a shooting game’
Caption: A North Korean man plays a shooting game at a booth along the Taedong River in
Pyongyang, North Korea on Monday, 11 October, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.10 ‘A North Korean man plays a boxing game’

Caption: A North Korean man plays a boxing game at a park in Pyongyang, North Korea on
Monday, 11 October, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.11 ‘A North Korean couple have a picnic’
Caption: A North Korean couple have a picnic along the Taedong River in Pyongyang,
North Korea on Monday, 11 October, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
Figure 3.12 ‘A North Korean girl sings’

Caption: A North Korean girl sings as her family have a picnic along the Taedong River in
Pyongyang, North Korea on Monday, 11 October, 2010 (AP Photo/Vincent Yu).
other publications, The Washington Post, Lee and Yu describe and depict their
experiences from when both were among a group of foreign journalists that were
allowed into North Korea for this ceremonial occasion. While some of the images
show already well-known motifs from military parades and mass events, several
others depict scenes that are usually not associated with daily life in North Korea,
at least in external media representations.
In contrast to the familiar depictions of misery, distress and scarcity, these
pictures show North Korean families, couples and people participating in leisure
activities: they amuse themselves in parks, attend shows, watch concerts and
enjoy having a picnic with plenty of food. Lee recalls wandering freely along
Pyongyang’s main river, and chatting with families who spontaneously invited
her and Yu to share in their food and beverages:
Three generations of one family feasted on beef stew, dumplings, tempura,

blood sausage and kimchi, the spicy fermented cabbage that is Korea’s most
famous condiment. Further down the river bank, a group of friends sang
and clapped as one woman gave an impromptu dance performance before
collapsing into giggles. Down by the riverside, fathers taught sons how to
shoot at a miniature shooting range, while others clustered around a rattling
football table. Others jumped into paddleboats that dotted the waterfront.
[. . .] As the sun set, the lights went on at the Triumph Children’s Park, an
amusement park just a stone’s throw from the Arch of Triumph where Kim
Il-sung made a historic speech just days after founding the Workers’ Party in
1945. The park pulsated with neon, and tree branches laced with small lights
gave the fair a festive air. Groups of friends posed for photos, and families
crowded into fast food joints selling fried chicken, burgers, Belgian waffles
and soft-serve ice cream cones. Children raced around from ride to ride,
lining up for bumper cars, a rollercoaster, a levitating pirate’s ship. One little
boy begged his mother to let him on just one more ride.
(Lee 2010a)
Wary that the idyllic and harmonic scenes challenged what Lee and Yu thought
they (and certainly not only they) knew about North Korea – usually known
only as an impoverished and isolated nation, struggling as a result of economic
hardship and the international sanctions imposed for its nuclear defiance – they,
tellingly, ask themselves if such a setting is possible at all.
As we looked over his [Yu’s] photos and recounted the day, Vincent shook
his head and asked aloud: ‘Was it real?’ [. . .] Were we among the lucky
few foreigners given the chance to experience what life is like for ‘real’
North Koreans?
(Lee 2010b)
Aware of the possibility that all of what they had seen could have been care-
fully choreographed for the benefit of the visiting international journalists, they
eventually decided against what would presumably typically prevail when con-
fronted with such accounts – scepticism, disbelief and incredibility. Their doubt-
ful response (‘Was it real?’), almost a reflex, itself points to the legitimacy and
hegemony of a particular mode of representation that allows only certain per-
spectives on subjects including poverty, scarcity and distress. However, as Lee
and Yu conclude,
There was no way the encounters could have been staged: the stew bubbling
on the portable gas cooker, the couple canoodling in the bushes, the screams
and laughs that filled the night air around the Tilt-a-Whirl. It may not have
been what we expected in one of the world’s last communist strongholds, but
it was definitely real.
(Lee 2010b)
Another example, one which invites an entirely different way of seeing North
Korea, is the photo essay that was published by the Guardian (Kalashnikova 2010)
during the preliminary stages of the September 2010 conference of the Worker’s
Party of Korea. The 15-part photo series, ‘Rarely seen North Korea’, shows pic-
tures that were taken by freelance photographer Irina Kalashnikova during a visit
to North Korea in August 2008. Kalashnikova accompanied Glyn Ford, at that
time the British member of the European Parliament responsible for relations
with Pyongyang. Similar to Lee and Yu’s accounts, Kalashnikova’s reveals
vibrant and colourful scenes that stand in stark contrast not only to van Houtryve’s
pictures in Foreign Policy but also to the commonly-held perception of how daily
life in North Korea is to be imaged and imagined. Taken during the summer
season, the day-time pictures expose a sunny and bright setting – including smil-
ing and active people – which stands out, for example, against the somewhat
contrived cold and sombre atmosphere that is conveyed in the Foreign Policy
photo series. Women are depicted attending a beauty parlour or playing at a pub-
lic beach; families are shown having a picnic and school children attending class.
One picture is of particular interest because it is a good example of how the
dominant means of portrayal can be contested (Figure 3.13). It shows a man,
identified by the caption as a farmer, at his home (Kalashnikova 2010). While the
caption draws attention to the flower beside him it is also worthwhile examining
what else is included in Kalashnikova’s photographic frame.
The image is not characterized by a personal code (a ‘close-up’), one which, as
has been discussed in the chapter ‘Approaching and analysing visual representa-
tion’ (Chapter 1), de-contextualizes a specific subject, but rather integrates a
range of objects – television, fans, paintings and sayings on the wall, rice cooker,
electronic equipments, armchairs – thus allowing the man to be recognized as
part of a particular social setting. Chosen as symbols that represent (parts of) the
man’s life – the saying on the walls at the centre means ‘Cradle of Life’, slogans
on the left and right ‘General’s family’ – the depicted objects are simultaneously
personal and universal, which impedes the creation of any gulf between the
viewer and the viewed subject. That is to say, this picture, via photography’s logic
Figure 3.13 ‘Farmer Choe Myong-chan at home’

Caption: Farmer Choe Myong Chan at his home in Haksan co-operative farm. Next to him
on his right is a Kimjongilia in a glass, a specially bred red begonia, named after Kim Jong-il
(Photograph: Irina Kalashnikova).
of inclusion/exclusion, does not foreground difference, distance and otherness

but instead highlights affinity, similarity and familiarity by placing the man in a
larger personal and social context. The reference to the man’s name and work
arguably make him even less anonymous. This photographic frame enables us to
look at the man not as a pitiful victim or prisoner in a realm of darkness (as, for
example, in ‘The Land of No Smiles’) who has to be fed and freed by us, but
instead as a dignified member of a social community.
Summary
From the discussion of the photographs of Lee/Yu and Kalashnikova it can be
concluded that both accounts convey very different visual impressions from the
ones that are evoked by the Foreign Policy photo series. In short, their images
are not depressing and distancing in the ways that the Foreign Policy ones are,
and they do not reduce the depicted people to mere passive participants who
cannot do anything but suffer in a world of gloom. The images do not thus high-
light only victimhood, but portray people in multi-faceted and pluralistic ways
that endow them with agency and social meaning: they are fathers and sons,
mothers and daughters, workers and farmers who have friends, families, food
and a home. In contrast to the above-discussed representations of ‘ordinary’
North Koreans, they appear not as mysterious or odd but rather as approachable
and therefore knowable.
Precisely because these people are depicted in this way, these representations
cause surprise and are considered implausible or even propagandistic because
they do not fit into the preconceived categories of how daily life in North Korea
is (to be) imaged for, and imagined by, an outside audience. The distinctiveness
or ‘deviancy’ of such images points to the dominance in political and media
discourses of a hegemonic form of visuality that permits only particular ways
of representing and interpreting life in North Korea. What can be argued, then,
is that people come to be defined by photographs, because pictures set the terms
under which we recognize them as, for instance, pitiful victims or instead as
‘normal’ or equal human beings. Consequently, visuality, and specifically the
type of visual representation employed, becomes the necessary condition for
the possibility of possessing and exerting social agency.
Certainly, particular limitations also apply to these photographs. Because
of the selectivity of photography, which is manifested in the image’s frame
of inclusion/exclusion, these pluralistic visions are, necessarily, open to politi-
cal appropriation. Since they too are not innocent or value-free reflections of
the world – we do not know how ‘real’ life in North Korea ‘truly’ is because
we are still presented with incomplete accounts of specific moments and
situations – these images are as political as they are invested with particular
relations of power. They are also political because they contest predominant
assumptions and imaginations about (life in) North Korea, and unsettle the
boundaries needed to delimit ‘us’ from ‘them’. The pictures reflect certain
power relations because the photographer or editor of the publication site still
continues to decide who or what is entitled to representation. The depicted peo-
ple probably have no say in the decisions made about how they are pictured and
represented to a wider public. With regard to Lee and Yu’s accounts, objections
could be raised that they, for instance, did not visit other locations but remained
only in Pyongyang, which is commonly described as being a showcase city
where only privileged and loyal North Koreans reside. Further, it could also be
pointed out that they, just as van Houtryve did, stayed in the capital only for a
couple of days thus failing to get a (complete) general overview of everyday life
in North Korea.
However, one of the most severe caveats that critics could issue is that they
focus on a special event, which the leadership of North Korea supposedly
intended to use for the presentation and promotion solely of official perspectives,
attitudes and values – domestically and globally – as the event was the very rea-
son why they and other international media outlets were allowed entry into
North Korea in the first place. In this vein, both could be blamed for making
themselves accomplices of the government’s gaze of distortion and propaganda,
in the sense that what we see from, and therefore know about, North Korea
depends entirely on what Lee and Yu have been permitted to image. Similar
concerns can be observed, as mentioned earlier, in controversial discussions
about North Korean art, which essentially centre around the question of whether
such works are pieces of art in their own right or mere propagandistic instru-
ments that promote a totalitarian ideology (Shim 2011).
However, such reactions or allegations, which seem not unlikely to be true,
then have to address the basic question of the ‘right’ means of representation or
self-representation. For if depictions like the ones from Yu and Kalashnikova,
or North Korean art in general, are generally denounced as supporting propa-
ganda purposes and/or being distorted records of North Korean reality, then the
possibility and legitimacy of alternative modes of representation are wilfully
denied. The marginalization of alternative modes of representation privileges,
and at the same time results from, particular ways of seeing and knowing that
favour an understanding of North Korea as conveyed, for instance, in the Foreign
Policy photo series. As Judith Butler (2004: 141) has argued, ‘those who gain
representation, especially self-representation, have a better chance of being
humanized, and those who have no chance to represent themselves run a greater
risk of being treated as less than human, regarded as less than human, or indeed,
not regarded at all’. To put it differently, the condition of being considered human
is refused through the denial of the legitimacy of alternative modes of representa-
tion (as with Yu and Kalashnikova) or self-representation (as in the case of
North Korean art) by dismissing outright these modes as mere propaganda. Such
serious judgements can serve particular purposes and enable the formulation
and implementation of political practices that might otherwise raise objections,
such as sanctions or international condemnations.
Questions of visuality reveal here their political and ethical nature, since
photographic representations are more than simple visual records. Making,
arranging and interpreting pictures are political acts that include complex power
relations between viewer, viewed and the realities of which they are both part.
Perhaps ‘propaganda’ should not be thought of as a practice used exclusively
by authoritarian and totalitarian leaderships. It can also refer to any efforts
that employ verbal or visual means to advance specific perspectives and per-
suade people to believe in certain ideas. To make either visible or invisible
particular aspects or subjects also has material consequences, because people
act upon what they know, which, in turn, is in part shaped by visual images. We
know how life in North Korea is, how to think – and what to do – about it simply
by looking at pictures. By pointing to their politics of inclusion/exclusion,
photographs, as has been shown, are accompanied by a range of questions
that have to be fully addressed for a thoughtful discussion to ensue. Visual
images are prone to political interpretation and therefore open to a number of
purposes, something which indicates the use of images as politics (cf. Sturken/
Cartwright 2001: 131). To identify the political rhetoric of photography, Shapiro
recommends,
To look at photographic statements on the basis of their tendency to either

reproduce dominant forms of discourse, which help circulate the exist-
ing system of power, authority and exchange or to look at them on the basis
of their tendency to provoke critical analysis, to denaturalize what is
unproblematically accepted and to offer thereby an avenue for politizing
problematics.
(Shapiro 1988: 130)
Photographs of North Korea can, therefore, perform important and relevant

political acts, either by reinforcing or by challenging the ‘dominant forms of
discourse’ and hegemonic imaginations. Visual representations are, therefore,
involved in the discursive structures that continuously help to produce and repro-
duce politics, of which the photographic treatment of everyday life and ordinary
people in North Korea is only one, albeit contentious and powerful, example.

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1 Approaching and analysing

The preceding chapter gave a glimpse of the importance of imaging in approaches

• Visuality, representation and international politics (for example, Campbell

Simply, panopticism and surveillance performed by appropriate institutions

The politics of visual representation

Why are photographs (assumed to be) special?

What is the problem with photographs?

What is the relationship between images and texts?

No amount of description [. . .] adds up to a depiction. A verbal representa-

How can images be discussed?

Which images and whose representations?

Against the background of the above-outlined methodological steps, the following

Figure 2.1 ‘A nation’s hunger in a child’s face’

Figure 2.2 Original photograph

Visuality, knowledge, politics

This chapter discusses visual representations, specifically in photographic essays,

Seeing is believing: imag(in)ing everyday life in North Korea

We must remember that the photograph is itself the product of a photographer.

The selective nature of photography refers to its most powerful mechanism:

Examining hegemonic visuality

Figure 3.1 ‘The Land of No Smiles’

Dermot Tatlow (2004), another photo-journalist, comments that people in

I’ve visited the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) twice, in

On his second trip to North Korea, van Houtryve notes that,

Photography and security

Besides shedding a different light on putatively dismissive North Koreans,

Contesting hegemonic visuality

Figure 3.3 ‘North Korean dancers perform during a concert in Pyongyang’

appearance, in a move targeting both a domestic and a global audience. Images

Figure 3.6 ‘North Korean soldiers watch a concert in Pyongyang’

Figure 3.8 ‘North Korean rowing boats’

Figure 3.10 ‘A North Korean man plays a boxing game’

Figure 3.12 ‘A North Korean girl sings’

Three generations of one family feasted on beef stew, dumplings, tempura,

Figure 3.13 ‘Farmer Choe Myong-chan at home’

of inclusion/exclusion, does not foreground difference, distance and otherness

To look at photographic statements on the basis of their tendency to either

Photographs of North Korea can, therefore, perform important and relevant

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