The Silence in Pyongyang

The silence in Pyongyang is what gets you. Not the absence of sound—actual silence, the unmistakable kind. No screaming, no rushed footsteps, no chaos. Just apartment blocks with planted balconies and French doors, amusement parks, and this suffocating quiet that makes the whole place feel like a set, not a city.

Photographer Dominik Schwarz spent last summer in North Korea and came back with images and observations that keep nagging at me. What struck him first was something obvious once you think about it: there’s no advertising anywhere. Not a billboard, not a logo, not a single commercial image on any surface. In a place where you design everything, the complete absence of visual noise hits differently. It’s almost more disorienting than if the walls were covered in propaganda.

Pyongyang has roughly the same population as Paris, but nothing in the photographs suggests it. No density, no energy, no noise. Instead there’s this uncanny emptiness, this sense that the entire apparatus of control is just barely holding its breath. And then the parades come—these massive coordinated stadium events that materialize the instant any group of tourists arrives. It’s like the system itself has to go on display, has to remind everyone watching that it’s running at full capacity.

I don’t know if I’ll ever go. Part of me wants to understand it firsthand—what that quiet actually feels like, whether the control reads the same when you’re standing in it, what Pyongyang smells like. Another part suspects some places are better left at a distance, understood through filters of photography and hearsay. Some things exist best as questions.