Kim Jong Il Looking at Things

Kim Jong Il Looking at Things is one of the most followed, shared and imitated monothematic Tumblr in recent years. An uninterrupted series of photographs of the North Korean Dear Leader looking at things, this series fascinates by its formal rigor and by the intensity of the imaginations it conveys.

Without taking away the primary function of these photographs – to elevate Kim Jong-Il to the rank of icon – this series shifts the subject and the stakes of the propaganda. The icon becomes a taxonomy, the viewer is looked at, and the meaning of the images keeps slipping away.

Accompanied by an unpublished essay by Marco Bohr entitled Watching Kim Jong-Il Look at Things, the book reveals the roots of our fascination with these images accumulated on the Internet – these memes – by analyzing how a series of seemingly innocent photographs becomes viral and attractive.

By publishing Kim Jong Il Looking at Things in its FOLLOW ME collection, Collecting Images Today, Jean Boîte Édition continues to highlight another art scene, which establishes the online collector as a creator, and installs the ephemeral in the perennial.