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Kim Jong Il Looking at Things

by Joao Rocha

Photographs: various photographers; edited by Joao Rocha

Text: Marco Bohr

Publisher: Jean Boite Editions

190 pages

Pictures: 74 color illustrations

Year: First published in 2012

ISBN: 978-2-36568-002-8

Comments: Hardcover; Collection "Follow Me, Collecting Images Today"; 16,7 x 24 cm; Graphic design by Renaud Othnin-Girard; Bilingual edition English and French.

Kim Jong Il Looking at Things is one of the most followed, shared and imitated monothematic Tumblr in recent years. Collected by João Rocha, this uninterrupted series of photographs of North Korea's Dear Leader looking at things fascinates with its formal rigor and intensity. Without removing these photographs their primary function - to raise Kim Jong-Il to an iconic rank - this series forces a shift in the purpose of propaganda. The icon changes to taxonomy, the viewer is being watched, and the meaning of this images beaks away.

Accompanied by an essay by Marco Bohr entitled Looking at Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things, the book reveals the springs of our fascination for these accumulated images on the Internet - these memes - analyzing how a series of photographs apparently innocent becomes viral and attractive. By publishing Kim Jong Il Looking at Things in the collection FOLLOW ME, Collecting Images Today, Jean Boîte Éditions continues to highlight another art scene, which establishes the online collector as a creator, and the ephemeral in the perennial.

« [The book] ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, but the unconscious humour in the images derives from the fact that, no matter how humble the object, each picture has been given the same portentous, formulaic treatment. »
– Martin Parr and Gerry Badger in The Photobook : A History Volume III, Phaidon Press Limited, 2014, London

« The spare, almost clinical look of the images (…) coupled with the often profoundly mundane nature of the objects at hand lend the entire portfolio a tone that is one part humorous and three parts crazy. […] Fortunately for all of us, the Dear Leader lives on in Rocha’s book, where we can look at him looking at things to our collective hearts’ content. »
– Time

« Are these pictures the works of North Korean photographers? Of Joao Rocha? Or of the web swarm that shares, reblogs, and forwards them? Memes owe their existence to multiple authors, while the book as a definite composition necessarily has an identifiable author. »
– Texte Zür Kunst

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look inside

Kim Jong Il Looking at Things

by Joao Rocha

Photographs: various photographers; edited by Joao Rocha

Text: Marco Bohr

Publisher: Jean Boite Editions

190 pages

Pictures: 74 color illustrations

Year: First published in 2012

ISBN: 978-2-36568-002-8

Comments: Hardcover; Collection "Follow Me, Collecting Images Today"; 16,7 x 24 cm; Graphic design by Renaud Othnin-Girard; Bilingual edition English and French.

Kim Jong Il Looking at Things is one of the most followed, shared and imitated monothematic Tumblr in recent years. Collected by João Rocha, this uninterrupted series of photographs of North Korea's Dear Leader looking at things fascinates with its formal rigor and intensity. Without removing these photographs their primary function - to raise Kim Jong-Il to an iconic rank - this series forces a shift in the purpose of propaganda. The icon changes to taxonomy, the viewer is being watched, and the meaning of this images beaks away.

Accompanied by an essay by Marco Bohr entitled Looking at Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things, the book reveals the springs of our fascination for these accumulated images on the Internet - these memes - analyzing how a series of photographs apparently innocent becomes viral and attractive. By publishing Kim Jong Il Looking at Things in the collection FOLLOW ME, Collecting Images Today, Jean Boîte Éditions continues to highlight another art scene, which establishes the online collector as a creator, and the ephemeral in the perennial.

« [The book] ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, but the unconscious humour in the images derives from the fact that, no matter how humble the object, each picture has been given the same portentous, formulaic treatment. »
– Martin Parr and Gerry Badger in The Photobook : A History Volume III, Phaidon Press Limited, 2014, London

« The spare, almost clinical look of the images (…) coupled with the often profoundly mundane nature of the objects at hand lend the entire portfolio a tone that is one part humorous and three parts crazy. […] Fortunately for all of us, the Dear Leader lives on in Rocha’s book, where we can look at him looking at things to our collective hearts’ content. »
– Time

« Are these pictures the works of North Korean photographers? Of Joao Rocha? Or of the web swarm that shares, reblogs, and forwards them? Memes owe their existence to multiple authors, while the book as a definite composition necessarily has an identifiable author. »
– Texte Zür Kunst

More books by Joao Rocha