Pyongyang by Andreas Gursky was photographed at the Arirang mass games in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 2007 and expanded in 2017 with two works derived from that trip.
The series began after Gursky encountered a news photograph of the state-organized festival, in which gymnasts, dancers, and schoolchildren formed coordinated displays. Access involved repeated negotiations and tightly controlled travel, culminating in permission to work from the central dignitaries' balcony at May Day Stadium. The subject extends Gursky's earlier engagement with crowds, repetition, and collective spaces while bringing individual bodies into tension with an ideological spectacle designed to be viewed as a unified whole. His description of photography as a combination of invention and reality frames the cycle as constructed imagery that retains a documentary connection rather than as straightforward reportage.
From the elevated viewpoint, rows of performers fill the frame in dense fields of saturated color, in both vertical and horizontal formats. Costumes, flowers, pom-poms, books, doves, weapons, and flip-card mosaics create repeating bands and geometric patterns. In Pyongyang I, performers in red and white form large petal-shaped formations around a central globe. Close viewing brings individual faces and expressions into focus. Smiling performers and festive colors coexist with the regimented spacing of bodies, and the scale of the prints sustains movement between the collective image and its human components.
Gursky worked with two large-format Linhof cameras placed side by side, using wide-angle and standard lenses with 100 ASA Fuji film. Exposures of 1/8 second, one-stop underexposure, and push processing addressed the stadium's lighting and movement. He learned the choreography so that he could release the shutter during brief pauses, discarding blurred frames. Hundreds of exposures later became material for enlarged studies, computer layouts, and laboratory work. Some finished images combine different moments and separately focused foreground, middle-ground, and background exposures, while distracting elements were removed. The finished works are large color prints face-mounted behind acrylic, with several exceeding three meters in width or height.
The first five photographs entered exhibitions in 2007 at Haus der Kunst, White Cube, Matthew Marks Gallery, Istanbul Modern, Kunstmuseum Basel, and Sharjah Art Museum, accompanied by catalogues from Snoeck and Hatje Cantz. Works from the cycle subsequently entered the collections of Fondation Louis Vuitton, The Broad, and the National Museum of Art, Osaka. Pyongyang VI and VII were first shown at the Hayward Gallery retrospective in 2018, and Pyongyang VI appeared in the Amorepacific Museum of Art's Seoul presentation in 2022.
