Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Amazing photos of North Korea

HT to Schwim

Big pictures, but amazing ones, compiled or taken by Eric Lafforgue, a photojournalist who attended the Pyongyang mass games this September, and seems to have done other work in North Korea during the year.

The North Korean Arirang Mass Games are amazing and terrifying at the same time: getting 60000 performers to move in unison is incredible, but if you think about the methods they probably used to train them . . . yurg.

You can see some of North Korea's natural beauty, but also note, with one glaring exception, the amount of suspicion in the eyes of North Koreans when they look at this foreign photographer. Two of my favourite from the series:




See the whole series here.

Eric Laffrogue's Flickr photostream: more here.

Video from the 2007 North Korean Mass Games: given their limited resources, this is miles more impressive than the Beijing Opening Ceremonies. Imagine what North Korea would do with an unlimited budget.
And those are people holding cards in the background.

those are all kids, by the way.

video of preparations for the games.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Pretty crazy huh? you might also like Vice Magazine's travel series which covered North Korea. Very cool/eerie/insane footage. When I first saw it couple months ago I watched all 14 parts in one sitting. Check it out here: http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1438428757

Roboseyo said...

I did see that documentary after ROK Drop brought it to my attention, and blogged it here.

http://roboseyo.blogspot.com/2008/03/happy-easter-heres-someone-to-pray-for.html

It blew my mind about twelve times over.