North Korea: Take a Peak into the World’s Most Closed Country
Yalu River, China/North Korea - August, 2026
That is North Korea, I thought to myself with equal parts excitement and disbelief. We cruised along the Yalu River, edging closer and closer to the North Korean shoreline. The Yalu River’s width of is barely more than a few hundred metres in places, close enough that for over an hour we sat inside North Korean waters, well over the border. The riverbank on the other side is Sinuiju, the country's main crossing point with China and, after Pyongyang, one of its more prosperous cities. From the water it looks almost ordinary: apartment blocks, cranes, a warehouse, a boat full of people out for the evening. It is also one of the most closely watched shorelines in the world.
I took a lot of photographs that evening, more out of instinct than any plan for what to do with them. Looking back through them later, I matched them using location data of where the boat actually was when each one was taken to create a rough outline of where in North Korea these photos correspond to. Below, ten of those photographs sit on the map, along roughly two kilometres of the Sinuiju waterfront. Click through them in order, upstream to downstream, and each one comes with what I could work out about what it shows: a guard post, state propaganda slogans, an officer who wasn't guarding anything, a boat packed with people I still can't be entirely sure about. Some of it is well documented, some of it is an informed guess, and I've tried to be honest about which is which.
None of it is meant to stand in for the country as a whole. It's ten frames from one evening on one river, but even that turns out to hold more than I expected and will give readers a rare look into the hermetic nation.
The Sinuiju Shore
Ten photographs taken from a boat on the Yalu River, looking at the North Korean shore.
A few things stayed with me after putting this together. How much of what North Korea wants seen and what it can't quite hide sit within the same few hundred metres of riverbank. How a border can be reopening and hardening at the same time, depending on whether what's crossing it is cargo or a person. And how often the most ordinary-looking thing in the frame, a boat full of people on an evening out, turned out to be the hardest one to actually explain.
I don't think any single photograph here proves much on its own. But looked at together, from a fixed set of points along one stretch of shore, they add up to something more honest than a single dramatic image usually manages: a place that is poorer, more watched, and more ordinary than either version of North Korea that usually gets told.
