A Photographer’s Search for Cracks in North Korea’s Propaganda Machine | The New Yorker

The photographer Max Pinckers likes his images to call into question the truthfulness of the subjects before him. In some of his photographs, the use of elaborate lighting and staging techniques can make it difficult to divine what is real and what isn’t. Recently, while preparing to travel to Pyongyang to take pictures for Evan Osnos’s New Yorker piece “The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea,” Pinckers knew that he would be entering a controlled environment, closely shaped by state officials, and he was fascinated by the knowledge that the scenes he photographed would be orchestrated by a foreign power.