Photo stories
For photojournalist Max Pinckers, the aesthetic of high-powered flash helps to highlight the perceived falseness of life in North Korea. He speaks to Amy Davies
Max Pinckers highlights the perceived falseness of life in North Korea
Taking home the main prize in the prestigious Leica Oskar Barnack Award is no mean feat. With a
€ 25,000 prize and a Leica M10 camera up for grabs, as well as the enormous cachet that winning it brings, it’s easy to see why the competition attracts some of the very best contemporary photojournalism.
Belgian photographer Max Pinckers shot this year’s winning series. Captured while he was on assignment in North Korea for The New Yorker with the American journalist Evan Osnos, it uses harsh ringlight flash to highlight the ‘unreality’ presented to the journalists.
Speaking to us from Berlin, where the winning series was recently exhibited at the New School for Photography, Pinckers explains how the project came to him, having never worked for the magazine before.
‘I don’t very often do assignments; I usually work on long-term documentary projects. I think the reason [ The New Yorker] asked me was because of my personal work – the construction behind my images. I use theatrical lighting to show boundaries between when something is objective or not.
‘I think what interested them about my way of working was, though we knew beforehand it would be quite restrictive and controlled, by making those images look fake or constructed, we could in a subversive way show a very controlled view of the situation.’
Pinckers worked to a fairly open brief, giving him the freedom to photograph anything. ‘It was difficult for them to know in advance exactly the conditions and the situations. We had a schedule which was predetermined, but they couldn’t clearly brief me on exactly what we would be shooting. I could photograph anything, and it would be relevant because it’s in this context of censorship and North Korea. The more I would photograph meaningless or banal things, the more relevant it would be because that would hint that, actually, I’m not seeing anything at all.’
In the end, Pinckers ended up with so many photos that a book showing more will be published this month. It may surprise Westerners to see the word ‘free’ associated with North Korea, but Pinckers was able to photograph without restriction. The images may feel forced, or staged, to our eyes, but Pinckers has a suspicion the truth is a little less black and white.
‘How can we tell if something is produced by the state? We can’t, to be honest. It’s also not something I can say with confidence that it’s fake – I think we are so preconceived in our ideas that it’s not real, that we assume that everything is fake, and prepared for Western journalists to see and so on. But I think it’s a lot more nuanced than that.
‘For example, Pyongyang, the capital, is only reserved for people who work for the government, or high-level citizens. The people there, they automatically know how to behave. They know when they see a Western journalist, they’re very disciplined. So it’s not that somebody’s telling them what to do, but it’s just a given that people behave like that. From our perspective, it seems very fake, but actually I think that it’s a lot more organic.
‘It’s very confusing, because we never really knew, and we can never really be sure of anything. Were these people just here because we’re here, or are they here anyway? We never really knew. That also made it quite good.’
Busy working on another long-term project right now, winning the Leica Oskar Barnack Award has enabled him to carry on doing what he does best – create more stories. Pinckers sees little benefit to going back to North Korea, at least in its current situation.
‘I don’t think I would gain much more from going back again. I think I kind of get what it’s like; I don’t think I’d learn a lot more. Of course, you’d see different places, different locations and different times, but essentially it comes down to the same thing. So I’m very satisfied with that one visit. But I would love to go again if the North and the South could reunite. I think that would be a wonderful time to revisit it from a completely different perspective – let’s hope that happens soon.’