North Korea Caught in Time: Images of War and Reconstruction (review)

Despite the publication of recent works in English—such as Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010); and B. R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (New York: Melville House, 2010)—that help shed light on the history of North Korea and the conditions of daily life in that most isolated of all countries, North Korea remains an enigma for most Western observers. Part of the difficulty in understanding North Korea is the paucity—except for a few works, such as Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution 1945–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Andrei Lankov, Crisis in North Korea: The Failure of De-Stalinization, 1956 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004)—of recent scholarship on the formative years of that totalitarian state, namely, the late 1940s through the 1950s. These were the years when Korea, after liberation from Japan’s colonial rule, was tragically split into two halves by the U.S. and Soviet military occupations and two rival regimes emerged on the peninsula, leading to the cataclysmic Korean War (1950–1953) and the subsequent reconstruction efforts in both the Republic of Korea in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the north. For those interested in understanding how North Korea came to form its self-identity through the upheavals of these years, the collection of photographs presented in the volume under review here is a valuable and welcome resource.

These 152 black-and-white photographs, with accompanying captions, present scenes from the DPRK from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, thus supplying views of North Korea from before, during, and soon after the Korean War. They are catalogued in the book under sections covering the war, postwar reconstruction, and aspects of DPRK life such as politics, agriculture, industry, culture, and education. A large majority of the photographs date from the years 1950–1957, the years of the war and reconstruction, though a few date from as early as 1945. Examining the photographs affords a visual introduction to North Korea’s experience during these tumultuous years and facilitates an understanding of how they affected the lives of the North Korean people. Most of the photos were unearthed from two photographic archives in Budapest: the National Museum and the Military History Institute and Museum of the Ministry of Defense. Most of these had been sent to Hungary by the Korean Central News Agency, the official mouthpiece for the Workers’ Party of Korea—the ruling party in North Korea since the country’s founding—and the North Korean government. In the 1950s, North Korea was actively engaged in various forms of exchange with “fraternal” Communist-bloc countries, including Hungary, and these photos were part of the DPRK’s effort to publicize itself to the outside world. Hence, the photos were propagandistic in nature. To say that many of them sought to portray North Korea and its cause in a favorable light would be an understatement. A great majority engage in brazen attempts to extol the legitimacy of North Korea and, in particular, its “great” leader, Kim Il-Sung, and some spew extreme invective against the “American imperialists” and their “puppet” South Korean regime under Syngman Rhee.

Most of the photographs contain varying amounts of artifice. Some were doctored (e.g., a purged politician has been erased), some were posed (the photographer has choreographed the subjects), some were staged (the photos depict events that did not happen), some were reenacted (especially scenes from the war), and some were photo-ops (i.e., the events depicted in the photos, such as political spectacles, served no purpose other than propaganda). However, a few apparently contain no distortions and were probably taken by foreigners visiting the DPRK, mainly Hungarians and Russians. These amateur photos present scenes of daily life in the DPRK in a more unmediated, natural...