One of the most followed and imitated single-subject blogs of its years: an uninterrupted series of official pictures of the Dear Leader of North Korea looking at things. The series holds the attention through its formal rigour and its insistence.

Without taking from these pictures their first purpose — raising the man to the rank of icon — the series forces the aim of propaganda to shift. The icon turns into taxonomy, the one who looks is looked at, and the sense of it all comes loose. An essay by Marco Bohr, Looking at Kim Jong Il Looking at Things, takes apart our fascination for these images heaped up online, and how an apparently innocent sequence turns viral.

“It ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous, but the unconscious humour in the images derives from the fact that, no matter how humble the object, each picture has been given the same portentous, formulaic treatment.” — Martin Parr and Gerry Badger