This shot became one of the most important in my collection. It exposed the regime’s lies without words. But the scariest part was still ahead. We drove outside of Pyongyang, to where the stage decorations ended.
In the countryside, control was even stricter. There were no skyscrapers here, just endless fields and people doing manual labor. I saw a man collecting grass in a public park. It looked strange, almost surreal.
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“Why is he doing that?” I asked the guide. “It’s for rabbits,” he answered quickly. But in the West, these photos would later be captioned: “Koreans eating grass due to starvation.” The guides knew these rumors and furiously hated such shots.
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“Distortion of reality,” is what they called it. But even if the grass was for animals, the sight of people gathering it by hand in the city center spoke of a deep crisis. I kept shooting, hiding the camera under my jacket.