The Quietest City on Earth

No advertising. Anywhere. Not on buses, not on buildings, not in the street. Photographer Dominik Schwarz spent a summer in North Korea and that detail—the total, structural absence of something so constant elsewhere that you stop seeing it—keeps surfacing in his illustrated travel diary from the most isolated country on the planet.

Pyongyang holds roughly the same population as Paris, he notes. The apartments have planted balconies and French doors. Small amusement parks exist and people use them. But what lingers in every description is the silence: not peaceful, not relaxing, but engineered. No uncontrolled shouting. Nobody running. The kind of stillness that reads as calm until you understand its origin, at which point it becomes something else entirely.

Whether I’ll ever get there myself—I genuinely don’t know. The tourist routes are tightly managed theater, obviously. The stadiums packed with synchronized spectacle that seem to assemble whenever foreigners appear suggest a country that has rehearsed its own image to an extreme degree. But even the managed version of a place this strange seems like it would rearrange something. Or maybe it just confirms what you already half-believed about what a city looks like when it’s organized around a different principle than profit. And then you go home and every billboard is twice as loud.