About

30 Illegal Photos Smuggled Out of North Korea refers to a series of image macros featuring humorous images paired with the sensational headline "30 Illegal Photos Smuggled Out of North Korea."

Origin

On November 30th, 2016, the website OtherBuzz.com^[2] published a slideshow entitled "30 Illegal Photos Smuggled Out Of North Korea." While the site and the photographs have since been removed, the description for the page reads:

This notoriously reclusive and secretive country has effectively shielded itself from the eyes of the world for decades. Even internet access and social media is highly guarded, with the average citizen having no access to it. Photographer Michael Huniewicz had the rare opportunity to step inside the small and strange country of North Korea and managed to slip out with photographs that were not approved by the state-run public relations media agencies. Fair warning: the deeper you go into this slideshow, the stranger things get.

Spread

On December 28th, 2016, the conservative media website "Conservative Daily Post"^[1] published an article entitled "30 Illegal Photos Smuggled Out Of North Korea." While the photographs on the page have since been removed, the summary on the article reads, "Some daring photographers have smuggled out various different photos of life in North Korea so the whole world can see. They sneaked out the memory cards of their cameras by secretly concealing it on them to bypass North Korea’s border security guards. These raw images give the world a clear insight into the impoverished country’s citizens."

Clickbait-style advertisements for the article typically are what the memes parody/. These feature a sensational photograph on top, followed by the article title (shown below).

One of the earliest known parodies was publsihed on January 16th, 2017 of the "Turtle Ship" from the video game Age of Empires. Posted in the extraedgyempires Facebook, ^[3] the post (shown below, left) received more tahn 1,400 reactions and 95 shares in a year and a half.

Three days later, the Instagram ^[4] account gucci_ayynis posted a variation in which a man is using his mind to levitate a piece of pizza (shown below, center).

The following year, on August 7th, 2018, Redditor ^[5] gba456 posted a photoshopped image of Hulk Hogan dj-ing a party attended by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and North Korea leader Kim John Un. The post (shown below, right) received more than 6,000 points (95% upvoted) and 40 comments.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References