While this presentation of photos from North Korea offers nothing new really (in terms of the kinds of imagery it presents), I did, however, learn one thing: I always thought of those cards that people are holding to create large-scale mosaics as pixels. In fact, I was so convinced that there were pixels that I never bother to look more closely at Andreas Gursky’s photos. However, as you can see above (I cut out a small region and blew it up), these cards (or pieces of paper or whatever they are) contain smaller units! So creating those mosaics doesn’t just require someone pixelating some image and then producing uniform cards, it means producing quite a few very specific cards that can only be used in their correct positions. That’s a mind-blowingly absurd effort in a country where most people don’t even have enough to eat!