Behind the Curtains

Over seven years, photojournalist Tomas van Houtryve secured unprecedented access to seven countries where the Communist Party still holds power: North Korea, Cuba, China, Nepal, Vietnam, Laos, and Moldova. The resulting photographs move past ideology to record a secretive world of revolutionaries, spies, opposition fighters, and ordinary workers, tracing the gap between communism's founding ideals and its present-day reality.

Published by Editions Intervalles in 2012 as van Houtryve's first monograph, the 288-page hardcover book carries a foreword by philosopher and historian Tzvetan Todorov. Van Houtryve began the project after working as an Associated Press photographer covering Latin America and Guantánamo Bay before leaving to pursue long-form documentary work, starting with the Maoist rebellion in Nepal that led him toward this broader survey of communism's twenty-first-century holdouts.

The related photo series won the 2012 POYi World Understanding Award. Van Houtryve, a Belgian-American photographer and emeritus member of VII Photo Agency, went on to produce Blue Sky Days, a drone's-eye view of American life that won the 2015 ICP Infinity Award; his work is held in the permanent collections of the International Center of Photography, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.