Foreign visitors to North Korea travel on a fixed itinerary, in the company of two government guides, and with a clear understanding of what the camera is and is not welcome to record. What makes the resulting photographs interesting is not the monuments everyone is taken to, but the ordinary moments that happen at the edge of the frame while the bus is moving.
The Coast Road Is Fenced On The Seaward Side
This looks like an unremarkable stretch of coastal highway until you notice what runs along the railing. Posts carrying strands of wire follow the shoreline for as far as the road does, facing out toward the water rather than inland. Sections of North Korea’s eastern coast are fenced this way, and the reason has nothing to do with keeping anything out. The sea is a route, and a fence makes it a supervised one. Visitors are usually driven past stretches like this without comment, which is part of why photographs of it exist at all. Nobody stops the bus to explain the wire, and the guides rarely bring it up unless a guest does first.