northkorea

Tensions are running high again on the Korean peninsula. As international observers watch closely for what move the North will play next, I thought it might be a good time to revisit some of my work from photographing in North Korea, undercover on-assignment, for the Globe & Mail in 2009.

This post is an extract from an article I contributed to the Digital Journalist the same year, recounting some of my experiences whilst photographing in this reclusive state. It was an experience I shall never forget…

Did you know North Korea had an official Flickr page? The country's account on the popular photo sharing service made headlines today after it was hacked and defaced by Anonymous.

In a recent Photoshop blunder, North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) was caught distributing the above doctored photo of a marine military exercise involving hovercraft. The photo, which was originally distributed to several news outlets, claimed to show the prowess of North Korea's marine force.

It didn't take long, however, for several news agencies to start pointing out some anomalies that all indicated the photo had been doctored.

Yesterday, Instagram announced that it had reached an impressive 100 million users, but the Instagram news making headlines today is only concerned with a select few of those.

That's because those select few, including the AP's David Guttenfelder and Jean Lee, have begun uploading the first ever Instagram photos from inside North Korea -- giving us an intimate glimpse at daily life inside the very closed off country.

Earlier this month, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt paid a visit to North Korea with former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. Schmidt's daughter Sophie also tagged along, and was allowed to snap photographs of things they experienced during their stay.

An American tourist traveling from Beijing, China to Pyongyang, North Korea pointed his camera out the train window to …

News photo agencies EPA, AFP, and Reuters have all issued kill orders for a photo of Kim Jong-il's funeral procession released by the Korean Central News Agency, the state news agency of North Korea. The photo (above at bottom) raised red flags after a comparison with a Kyodo News photo taken just seconds earlier revealed that a number of people had vanished from the scene. The New York Times writes,

A side-by-side comparison of the full images does point to a possibly banal explanation: totalitarian aesthetics. With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight.

Perhaps it was a simple matter of one person gilding the lily.

The North Korean government is the latest to get caught trying to feed a poorly Photoshopped photo …

When's the last time you saw some amateur video shot from inside North Korea? There's a good chance the answer is never, given how secretive the country is and how tight the policies are for what outsiders are allowed to do. Photojournalist Steve Gong, however, captured some really high quality video from inside the country using a Canon 5D Mark II.