Epic of the Soldiers, from the "North Korea, a Life between Propaganda and Reality" series

About the Photographer

Wielinga, Alice

Dutch, b. 1981

On a state-controlled tour of North Korea, Dutch photographer Alice Wielinga caught a glimpse of daily life in the country from her van window: men lying on asphalt roads to keep warm, kids collecting acorns and digging for roots, people fishing with handmade rods. The jarring contrast between the extreme poverty her guides could not fully hide and the ubiquitous paintings of well fed, smiling children surrounding the Great Leader Kim Il Sung motivated her series, “A Life Between Propaganda and Reality.” Working in a painterly fashion, Wielinga combines propaganda pictures she collected on her trip with documentary photographs she took surreptitiously with a high-quality compact camera. Her tableaux fuse fantasy and reality, featuring images made over more than 1,550 miles of inland North Korea.

Alice Wielinga completed her Bachelor’s degree in photography from the Academy of Arts St. Joost, Breda, the Netherlands (2004). She has been widely exhibited around the globe and has held solo exhibitions at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Arles, France (2015) and the Museum het Grachtenhuis, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2015). She received first prize in fine art for the Moscow International Foto Award (2015) and was awarded Photographer of the year by Dutch Fotonieuws (2014).