A man overrides his camera's firmware to bring rare pictures of North Korea back

Well, for starters, comparing the people who live in North Korea to animals is one way.

> It's quite incredible to witness Chinese or South Korean tourists interacting with North Korean fishermen - it reminded me of safaris is [sic] East Africa. You keep wondering, what are the North Koreans really thinking?

And that's only on the fourth slide.

>The Chinese city where you get to do that is called Dandong. I read somewhere it was the most humane of Chinese cities, most having become a polluted nightmare these days...

If he was being ironic I must have missed it. He seems to regard Dandong as the pinnacle of Chinese economic ascendancy when the city actually has a reputation for rampant violent crime thanks to smuggling and drug trade that occurs across the border.

>Pluralism and individualism are regarded as the greatest enemy. I understood the significance of being able to drive a car anywhere you want, when you please, where you please - as our guide told us in North Korea you only travel big distances by bus or train, when you get permission.

Internal visa is an evil system, but this paragraphs just reeks of material and moral superiority. Hey why don't you just become a rugged individual like me and save up for a car when there is only three scheduled trains every week?

>North Koreans supposedly believe that the entire world is in awe of their achievements.

That's a lot to ask for a paddy field in the middle of nowhere.

>The man has some genuine dignity.

Again, really hard to figure out whether it is sarcasm or not.

See, I am not interested in defending the NK regime. However the author/photographer shows a rather disappointing lack of understanding, respect or the slightest empathy to for his subjects. Hence his pictures, while technically sound, are no better than the millions of photos taken by Western tourists in North Korea.

> At night, the elderly Chinese dance in the streets in unison avoiding any displays of individuality.

This comment would be the same as going to an aerobics class and saying "the gym rats move in unison avoiding any displays of individuality". These dancing grannies are not much difference, one of the main reasons they do this is for health and to stay active. Like going to the gym there is also a social component; health and social reasons are why the grannies dance. Actually each group does things differently and the moves are part of the tradition. It's as about anti-individualistic as going to an aerobic or yoga class.

Really, it starts going bad at the opening:

> The Koreans are one nation, but not unlike Germany, the country was divided between the USSR and the US following World War 2.

This is just factually incorrect. A more apt comparison would be Germany and Austria. Yes they are both ethnically Korean, but Korean has only been unified for about half it's approximately 1500 year history and when it was unified it was often unified in a similar feudal way that Germany and Austria where "unified" in the HRE. The reality is Korea has always been the primary location of proxy wars between China and Japan. The only unified points was when one of China or Japan was strong enough to dominate the whole peninsula. Even the North/South terms are very Western in origin with most surrounding Asian countries having completely different names for the two countries that are as related as "Germany" and "Austria".

On the ground within South Korea, especially towards the south of the country, there just isn't a sense that unification should even be attempted or that the two countries have much in common.

Finally, one of the main reasons China is willing to take a stronger hand against North Korea and support sanctions is because South Korea has been moving increasingly from Japanese/American sphere to the Chinese sphere of influence. Especially under the conservative Park. This more than anything else is likely to spell doom for North Korea.

What would it mean for you to "look at political issues from a neutral perspective"?

Much of it was misinformed or plain wrong. The particulars has been extensively discussed in this thread.

> The motivated spectator can then google details about your camera's firmware for the next time you travel to North Korea yourself.

The photographer appears to use Nikon SLRs which I am familiar with (I have a Df and has been using Nikon for the past decade). A handful of old models had homebrew firmware patches but it was mostly for shooting video[0]. There has been no new releases since.

Can somebody point me where to look? Googling turned up nothing like what's been described in the linked gallery.

[0]http://www.diyphotography.net/hacked-nikon-firmware-allows-m...

That said, it doesn't mean that the paranoia you see in these sorts of blogs is entirely warranted - in my experience NK wasn't particularly interested in oppressing random tourists (they want those sweet, sweet dollars). They will take a great deal of offense if you go in and rip down their propaganda posters, though. :)

That said, it wasn't that long ago that North Korea was on Bush's hit list ("axis of evil"), we regularly organize large military exercises preparing for a new Korean war, and we've got all sorts of belligerent rhetoric that a paranoid DPRK intelligence officer would definitely take as a threat. Even confirmed war hawks like Bernie Sanders name them as the biggest threat to the US on the world stage (which is ridiculous, IMO).

I agree that we're not at all likely to invade NK any time soon, but GWB declared Iran, Iraq, and NK to be "the Axis of Evil" and then promptly invaded Iraq. To an outside observer, that's a hell of a lot more than a hint.

To be honest, I didn't get a whole lot out of my visit. Everywhere I go, humans are pretty much like humans elsewhere. If you've been to another repressive third-world country and pay attention to posts like this, you have a pretty good idea of what North Korea looks like - its aesthetic form is just more extreme and it's trying to pretend to tourists that it's a second world country. My inner giant-statues fan was pretty pleased. I would say that it met my expectations going in. If anyone is ever in China and has a few days and a few hundred dollars to kill, I would highly recommend it. I wouldn't recommend making the flight just for the DPRK.

My personal takeaway is that I no longer like the hard-line stance against North Korea, don't think the sanctions are a good idea (I did going in), and would rather see them brought into the international community via the inexorable march of global capitalism. I suspect that isolating them only makes them more dangerous to the civilian population and more willing to lash out to the international one. (In other words, they behave like humans everywhere else in the world!)

[1] http://fr.euronews.com/2016/03/14/rares-photos-ostensiblemen...

[2] "Ses photos, il a réussi à les prendre parfois au su des gardiens guides qui encadrent sans aucune relâche les touristes dans le pays, puis à les cacher de la censure en “modifiant le logiciel de l’appareil photo afin que le bouton effacer n’efface pas vraiment les photos” mais simplement ne les affiche plus."

The defector here uses Kakao Talk to contact his NK family every day, and he manages to send them money on a regular basis at only a 15% fee through some Chinese Hawala-like network. Most of the military and party officials like to gamble remotely in Chinese/Myanmar casinos so there is widespread unregistered money transfer networks in place across the country.

So... just a backdoor, then?

US is a superpower and if it wants to keep its allies alive it needs to do something for them as well. Your double standards really surprise me.

US cannot afford to loose SK but if the US keeps ignoring the NK/China problem that will push SK more and more to the hands of Chinese.

Sooner or later you will realize that koreans are the bffs of China, Japan feels threatened and there is nothing you can do about that boiling hot pot that formed in the Pacific.

It's not about NK's suffering population at all. Nobody cares about them and that is what's scary.

Dictatorships really don't care what you think, they care what you DO, and more importantly, they care what you can openly discuss and with whom. Making it easy to spot those likely to rebel is the goal of propaganda, who gives a hoot what anyone thinks.

the entire population of north korea is ~24m. while i have no doubts that the nork prison camps are hideously inhumane, there's no way they approach the extermination camps in eastern europe of ww2