In a photograph, five schoolchildren stand before a blue wall. Their starched white shirts throw them into sharp relief. From behind the tinted lenses of their bright yellow sunglasses, they look directly at the viewer. Just as the viewer looks at them.
When French photographer Stephan Gladieu’s request to travel to North Korea was approved, he knew he wanted to focus on capturing the country’s people. “I made it clear from the beginning that I will not do architecture photography or photograph empty places—that had no interest for me,” Gladieu tells Euronews Culture.
“I wanted to give a representation of North Korean people, knowing that the North Koreans were totally invisible, because the regime over there does not talk about them much. And also because in Europe, the United States, and Asia, nobody really cares about the North Koreans.”
There are more than 26 million people in North Korea, according to the World Health Organization. The community is largely severed from the rest of the world, with a regression of people’s access to information over the last decade, as a 2025 report by the United Nations Human Rights Office shows.
Over the course of five trips to the country between 2017 and 2020, Gladieu pieced together a series of portraits titled ‘North Korea’, which offers a glimpse of a community conspicuously absent from global media coverage.
