Unperson

Unperson is one of the first photo books of North Korean Defectors. The 15 intimate portraits and the stories of the brave people who decided to take that chance to flee to South Korea. The road to South Korea is dangerous and can take years with the many different borders of Mongolia, Laos, Thailand, and China. The people fleeing are filled with the fear of being arrested and sent back to labour camps. Once they arrive in South Korea, they often struggle to find a new identity, lost between their North Korean past and South Korean future. Tim Franco travelled to the crossing points, aiming to capture the diversity of landscape that is the background of North Korean defection. He chose to use an 8x10 camera with Polaroid film to capture each defector. In George Orwell's 1984, an unperson is someone who has been vaporized, whose record has been erased. As each defector begins their new life, they all start out as an Unperson.
About the Author: Tim Franco is a French-Polish photographer born in Paris in 1982. In 2005, he moves to China and starts documenting its incredible urbanization and social impacts while collaborating with newspapers such as Le Monde, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. In 2015, he publishes his first Monograph: Metamorpolis--the conclusion of five years of work about the rural migration in the fastest urbanizing city in the world: Chongqing. It is during this time that Tim develops his style of working mostly on analog cameras and trying to bring a minimalist aesthetic to documentary photography. It is also while applying those principles that Tim starts to focus his work around portraiture. While experimenting with different photographic process he wishes to give a voice to underrepresented communities. In 2016, Tim Franco moves to South Korea where he starts working on a long term project about North Korean defectors. Sébastien Falletti is a journalist, author, and speaker, currently China/East Asia correspondent for French daily newspaper Le Figaro. He has been covering the two Koreas since 2009, based successively in Seoul, Shanghai, and Beijing, and traveled several times to North Korea. He has published A thousands miles to Freedom, My escape from North Korea (St Martin's Press, 2015) with North Korean defector Eunsun Kim, as well as La Piste Kim, voyage au coeur de la Corée du Nord (Equateurs, 2018). He is also the author of Corée du sud, le goût du miracle (Nevicata 2016) and was a regular contributor to Jane's Defence Weekly, as well as Geo Magazine.