Inside North Korea

North Korea painted the insides of its public buildings the colors of a nursery. Not the gray brutalism the word dictatorship summons, but mint green, salmon pink, and powder blue, symmetrical and spotless and lit like a stage. Oliver Wainwright went to Pyongyang braced for austerity and came home with a palette you would choose for a maternity ward.

Wainwright is the Guardian's architecture critic, and he made these pictures on the tightly managed tours that are the only way a foreigner sees the country. Health centers, theaters, schools, sports halls, the metro, the hotels: all of it staged for visitors, all of it captured on an official minder's itinerary. The result is a document of a surface, and the volume is honest about that. Nobody here wandered off to find the real thing behind the paint.

The photographs are frontal, symmetrical, and patient, which is exactly right for the subject. Wainwright centers each space and lets the architecture's obsessive order fill the frame: matching columns, mirrored staircases, a lone attendant standing sentinel beside an empty escalator. The color does the heavy lifting. He shoots it straight, without irony, and the deadpan approach is what makes the images land. A jokier eye would have winked; this one simply records, and the records are stranger than any commentary.

Individual rooms lodge in the memory. A maternity hospital lobby in acid green. A water park roofed in a blue so synthetic it looks lit from within. A theater the pink of boiled sweets, its seats folded and waiting for an audience that never arrives on camera. The symmetry is not accidental; the architecture was built to dwarf the individual with the order of the collective, and the camera obligingly reports that order back.

The emptiness is the tell.

That emptiness is where the discomfort lives. These candy-colored halls were made to hold crowds performing contentment, and photographed vacant they read as sets waiting for a cast. Wainwright's introduction quotes the regime's stated ambition to turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland, and the phrase hangs over every plate. The interiors are genuinely beautiful and genuinely sinister at once, and the collection never reconciles the two, because the two do not reconcile.

There is a quiet argument here about restraint behind the camera. Faced with a subject this loaded, the temptation is to editorialize with angle and shadow, to make the pictures say what you already think. The stronger choice, the one on display across these pages, is to stand square, expose cleanly, and let the loaded thing enchant or indict itself. Photographers who shoot interiors for a living will recognize the discipline, if not the destination.

It helps to take the volume on its own terms. A designer's eye trained on the theater a state built for outsiders will document that theater superbly, and these plates do. They compel largely because of where they were taken, and a skeptic could argue they aestheticize a propaganda surface that deserves suspicion more than admiration. Wainwright seems alert to the trap; the flat, unseduced style is his answer to it, though the charge never fully lifts.

Picture the actual moment of making one of these frames. A guided tour moves you through a spotless, deserted concert hall, the minder checking a watch, the pink walls glowing under lights kept on for no audience. You have a few seconds and a fixed vantage. You square the camera to the symmetry, hold still, and take the room exactly as it is handed to you, knowing the handing is the whole point. What comes back is a portrait of a place that has arranged itself to be seen, and of the seeing it will permit.