A KINGDOM REVEALED
Canadian photographer risked his freedom to capture North Koreans’ day-to-day lives
It was about three to four hours into a 36-hour train trip from Pyongyang to Rason in North Korea when Austin Andrews went through his first military checkpoint.
Soldiers boarded the train and entered his cramped compartment to search his phone and camera for images. One of them saluted, which Andrews awkwardly returned. Then they sat down and started going through the first collection of images the Calgary-born photographer had managed to capture from the moving train.
Needless to say, not many passed muster.
“The first time it happened, I think I had about 130 photos on my card,” says Andrews, now back in his Vancouver home. “They went through and deleted all but maybe 12 of them. The ones that they left were the ones that had no human presence at all — no villages, no people riding on bicycles, no ox carts. It was just the outline of trees silhouetted against the sun, or a frozen river carving its way through a countryside. But as soon as there was a presence of people, they knew to delete those.”
Which may have severely limited the scope of images found in Andrews’ latest book, Red Star Utopia: Inside North Korea. But the photographer’s camera had two SD card slots. Each picture was saved to both. When the soldiers came, he kept one in his inside pocket.
There were two more military checkpoints and the card was never discovered. While this all may sound somewhat cloak-anddagger, and perhaps downright foolhardy given North Korea’s reputation, Andrews says he wasn’t trying to break the rules.
In fact, he didn’t take photos of things he knew would cause alarm, such as the sprawling military camps, decaying cities or scenes of severe poverty that he saw through the train window.
“Certain things that I thought would be relatively innocuous were deleted with impunity at those military photo checks,” he says. “But I started getting increasingly anxious because I was blindingly aware by that point that I had the master, with all those photos that had been deleted, still on me in my inner pocket. It felt more and more like contraband. I don’t know how much of that was paranoia and how much of that was reality. Because it’s not a country where you want to be landing on the wrong side of the law.”
Some of those images are in the book, published this week from Durville Publications’ UpRoute Books and Media imprint. That includes the cover photo of three men cycling through the snowy countryside. There are shots of soldiers walking atop a freight train during a snowstorm in rural South Hamgyong province, and one of labourers standing in a grim rural rail yard. The military deleted all of them, but Andrews had stealthily preserved them and taken them out of the country on his secret SD card.
The photographer, whose photos have appeared in Time and Maclean’s, didn’t set out to reveal military secrets. He wasn’t interested in chronicling poverty, either. In the intro to his book, Andrews says “the lens often sees these sights as cheap spectacle anyway, of value mostly for their unfamiliarity or their ability to provoke easy emotions.”
Andrews was more interested in capturing what he calls the “rhythms and routines of daily life.” In December 2017, he was the first foreigner allowed on the slow-moving Pyongyang to Rason train unattended. He returned in May for a second trip, which happened to be just two weeks before the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Korean leader Kim Jong Un. This time, he had a guide with him at all times, but it still allowed Andrews to photograph North Korea in less frigid conditions.
There are nearly 100 photos in the book drawn from those two trips, many of them depicting dayto-day life in Pyongyang. Some do have unsettling Orwellian overtones. One, for instance, depicts the state-sanctioned evening news being eerily beamed from a massive screen into the dark public square in central Pyongyang. Another shows solemn schoolchildren ritualistically cleaning the plaza around the city’s Mansudae Grand Monument.
But many show North Koreans engaged in everyday activities, greatly downplaying the country ’s reputation for hermit-kingdom otherness. There is a photo of girls eating hot dogs and of a chattering, jostling mob of teens skating during a school outing. There are images of boys playing soccer and adults staring out from behind the windows of a trolley bus. There are shots of a pool hall/bowling alley filled with North Koreans relaxing on a Sunday, of boys wrestling in a cabbage field in the countryside and of North Koreans waiting for a bus during a beautiful sunset.
“That’s what I was so drawn to,” Andrews says. “It was to my enduring regret that I wasn’t able to see or capture more of that. I would have loved for the entire book to be moments like that. Those were just nice opportune moments that were just a fleeting glimpse, that if my camera hadn’t been up at that moment I wouldn’t have been able to get while we were going from one place to another. That’s just the reality of travel in that country.”
For the past decade, Andrews has been travelling around the world, looking for those increasingly rare outposts that he calls “blank spots on the map.” Last December, he published Shadow Hymns, his first book of photographs drawn from travels to Kabul, Kandahar, South Africa, Myanmar, Tanzania and a ghost town in Svalbard, among other unique spots on the globe.
He says he would like to return to North Korea and take more photos. For now, he hopes Red Star Utopia offers a more down-to-earth look at what largely remains a tantalizing mystery to the western world.
Red Star Utopia: Inside North Korea is in stores.