Damir Šagolj
North Korea, 2017
Dimensions: 88 mm x 125 mm
It wasn’t my first time in Pyongyang. Another big military parade, same choreog- raphy, same music, maybe a new type of missile on trucks.
But this time, James P. and I were really paying attention to the hardware… wheels, screws, stuff like that. One of the trucks pulling a shiny new SLBM had something on it suggesting it wasn’t made in Pyongyang, which would be, techni- cally, against UN sanctions. That’s exactly what we came to report on, beyond the usual choreography of a foreign journalist’s visit to North Korea.
As usual, phones were taken away by security for the duration of the parade. So we had to write things down, old school. I had my usual elegant Muji notebook, but the wrong pen.
It rained a lot those days in Pyongyang, and it made the pages of my notebook look just like my memory: patched and confused. But thankfully, photos don’t wash away.
