The Beautiful Route

Hiroji Kubota went to North Korea thirteen times between 1978 and 1992. He brought back photographs. Good ones - the kind where the light is right and the composition works and you’re drawn into looking. Mountains, buildings, people going about their day like everything is normal and fine.

Photographs don’t lie, exactly. Kubota shot what was there. The regime just controlled where there was - they showed him certain cities, certain landscapes, certain crowds arranged in certain ways. Everything in the frame is real. The frame itself is just selected, constrained, edited before the shutter clicked.

What gets to me is knowing what I know about that country - the camps, the executions, the fear machinery - and these photographs still work on you. They’re beautiful. They make you want to see the place. That’s not a flaw in the photographs. It’s their function. The regime controlled what Kubota could see and he made good images of it and now those images do exactly what they were meant to do.

I’ve designed things. You know how it works - you layer elements until the surface looks coherent, functional, intentional. The regime did the same thing with geography and propaganda. The skill was in the curation, and Kubota’s photographs are evidence that it worked.

I wonder what he thought about what he was doing there. The photographs don’t tell you. They just show you the surface, which is all photographs can ever do.