This book presents a disquieting reflection on the act of seeing and believing, through a fictional trip to North Korea. The republic is presented via a playfully coded visual game, which reflects on photography’s expressive privilege to make visible the hidden, to offer certainties that strengthen our desire to believe. Goodbye Pyongyang offers a singular enquiry that investigates precisely that force.
According to the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, the conquest of the world as picture constituted the fundamental event of the modern age. And yet, that fulcrum (which is offered to us) is not to be found in reality, but in its artificial reflection, in the symbolic reproduction of the image. The partnership between reality and truth, having lost its erstwhile hegemony, is intensely being questioned by photographers like Simão. This challenge to photography’s previous aspirations to objectivity, this offering of an illusion of reality that treats the world as fiction, is precisely one of the key issues that Simão addresses.
Goodbye Pyonyang offers observers the possibility to reconsider their visual codes, and revives a playful complicity between the image and the viewer. And we witness how that fictional trip, thanks to photography, has become real.
The serie as about 40 images made in Portugal, Spain and Netherlands.