Undergraduate / Common Application Personal Essay - Photography and North Korea [5]

Zoom in. Focus. Click.

It was a rainy summer afternoon when I discovered her in the attic above my mother's bedroom, hidden beneath a thick layer of dust and surrounded by a fortress of boxes and spider webs. She was an old Minolta, and with her I started practicing the very basic skills that I could teach myself from the library's old-fashioned manuals or by imitating the photographers with big cameras on the main boulevard. Before long I found myself snapping all sorts of things around me: the zigzagging ant lines in the backyard grass, our bathroom's toilet roll, the talking parrot at the supermarket and the never-ending traffic jams of Caracas, to name a few. Soon, photography was more than just a hobby to me, and even though I enjoyed seeing a big part of my life through the lens of the camera I felt that I wanted to capture much more than just my immediate surroundings. I wanted to see beyond the 18mm of my macro lens, and get to know all those places I had heard of and read about in movies and books. As a curious teenager I was lucky enough to be awarded a scholarship to study for two years at the Li Po Chun United World College of Hong Kong, and this is how I started the journey from my beloved Venezuela to the faraway lands of Asia, where those breathtaking National Geographic cover photographs finally came to life in front of me.

Being able to live in a school with people from more than eighty other countries allowed me to discover myself in completely new levels. Incredible experiences, conversations, questions and situations all formed part of my life here, but out of them all there is one that clearly stands out in my mind.

It was also a rainy summer afternoon when the two of us landed in Pyongyang. As I stepped out of the plane I could hardly believe that I was in the capital of one of the most reclusive countries in the world: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. I blinked several times to make sure it was real. As part of one of my school's projects, we had gone there to forge links with the aim of including North Korea in the list of countries that send young teenagers from all over the world to study at the United World Colleges, which were founded precisely to promote peace and cultural understanding among young people.

Zoom in. Focus. No click. Something stopped me. "Photography is not allowed without authorization," said over my shoulder one of the guides that had been assigned to our group. It took me a minute or two to put the lens cover back on but I just kept holding up the camera, somehow wanting her to see through that black plastic blindfold. As I would notice later on, in that land she was object of furtive glares, she was feared and frowned upon. I felt frustration, impotence and even sadness. It surprised me how much I would get affected by this, especially because I had been warned about the strict regulations in the country.

Anywhere else, it was so easy for me to carry her around and capture an expression, a moment or a landscape by simply pressing a button. Not in there. To me, North Korea was beautiful, unique and bittersweet. During my time there I learnt and realized many things: I heard facts about the country's rich history and sociopolitical dynamic; I struggled with the language barrier while talking to An Kwan-Uk, a student my age with similar expressions of hope but such different life experiences, and I felt goose bumps while watching more than 100,000 people perform simultaneously at the Arirang Mass Games. I had the chance to go on a goodwill trip to a nation that is very little known and I felt honored to be there, although a bit flustered at times. Unexpectedly, it was the concept of freedom that stopped being so foreign to me. I went into North Korea thinking that they did not have a notion of what freedom was, but there I realized that I did not even have it myself. Studying in a place where freedom and independence are encouraged, I realized that I had gone there promoting those ideals, without really knowing what it meant not to have them.

I have always felt great appreciation for photography, which for me has been an art form and not just a mere form of documentation. I went into a country where reality is very different from the one I am used to, and that experience has made me reflect and appreciate on my own aspirations and the opportunities I have been given. I used to understand freedom as the possibility to load a camera and take photographs without limitations, but it was not until after North Korea when its true meaning became more real and less abstract to me. I was then able to look at it not only through the lens of my camera, but with my own eyes. In the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, I found that old Minolta to be the link to many of my other passions, instead of just being the filter through which I perceived my surroundings.