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Someone recently passed along a link to the website of British photographer Charlie Crane. In it (click on “Personal” then “Welcome to Pyongyang”) a collection of 28 photographs of the city that he took in 2007 which were part of a later book by the same name that he produced with Nicholas Bonner in 2009. The photographs are astonishing—it is a Pyongyang nearly devoid of people, and one is almost tempted to say nearly devoid of life. I have no idea how much editorial control the authorities exercised over the composition of these photos, but it is almost as though the Pyongyang that is presented is someone’s highly stylized view of how Pyongyang ought to be. Rigorous and beautiful, these photos are almost the antithesis of the idiosyncratic video by Steve Gong that I posted last month.
