DMZ: Demilitarized Zone of Korea

A photographic survey of the Korean Demilitarized Zone by Park Jongwoo, made at the invitation of the South Korean Ministry of National Defense and published by Steidl in 2017 as a Steidl Book Award Asia title.

The zone runs about 248 km long and 4 km wide, 60 km from Seoul, and has stayed under armistice conditions since the Korean War ended in 1953. When the ministry invited Park to work there in 2009, no comprehensive photographic record existed of an area closed to civilians. Park photographed it until 2012. The pictures set barbed wire, outposts and armed troops against a landscape that, left alone for decades, has grown back into one of the best-kept temperate habitats in the world. Softcover, 288 pages, with a text by Alasdair Foster.

Park was born in Seoul in 1958 and works in documentary photography and video. From 1983 to 1995 Park was a photojournalist for the Korea Times, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Park's own projects record disappearing cultures and minority peoples, among them twenty years of work in the Himalayas.