ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the prevailing assumptions undergirding the distance between 'us' and 'them' (North Korea) more broadly which hierarchically constructs the world. Framing the 'North Korea problem' as a special case of dictatorship is to understand suffering like poverty and political oppression as situations particular to 'Third World' countries like North Korea where dictators can reign. North Korea is produced as an object of intervention by international humanitarian organizations. The chapter examines how this dominant imagining of North Korea as an object of international help and concern is visually constructed, that is how images and stories that are captured and told through cameras try to turn North Korea into a target and object of outside help. Implied in the sophisticated method towards photography is the idea that an intersection of art, documentaries and journalism can open up the complex, shifting, fertile space of encounter between photography and North Korea.
