The Korean Demilitarised Zone runs some 250 kilometres across the 38th parallel and is about four kilometres wide, a de facto international border since the 1953 Armistice Agreement. Troops from both Koreas are stationed along it; visual and electronic surveillance is continuous; electrified barbed wire, armed guard posts, watchtowers, land mines and heavy weapons defend the perimeter. Those are the publisher’s terms, and they establish the ground Michael Kenna photographed at Cheolwon, Gangwondo, in 2005 and at Paju, Gyeonggido, in 2012. Kenna is the sole credited photographer of the book, and thirteen duotone plates carry the work.
DMZ – The 38th Parallel opens Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series. The format is a compact hardcover measuring six by eight and a half inches, and the thirteen plates hold the sequence within it. Kenna’s photographs were made on the two documented visits, seven years apart, and the book presents them as a fixed set rather than an extended survey. The publisher’s account of the zone — troops, surveillance, the instruments of defence — frames what the pictures address, and the sequence gives the reader a bounded encounter with that terrain.
Each copy is hand-numbered within a limitation of 500 and includes an original five-by-seven-inch print signed by the artist. A small number of artist’s proofs were also made available for individual purchase. The signed print and the hand-numbered copy are the edition’s defining facts, and the book’s position as the first title in the One Picture Book Two series is documented by the publisher as part of the same release.
For collectors following either the One Picture Book Two series or Kenna’s work, the book offers a specific conjunction: a compact hardcover, thirteen duotone plates drawn from two visits to the South Korean DMZ, a hand-numbered copy within a stated limitation, and a signed original print. The photographs take as their subject a border that is maintained by military and technological means, and the book’s form holds that subject in a small, fixed sequence.
