life:

BREAKING: Kim Jong-Il is dead.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) remains the world’s longest-lived dictatorship, home to a near-perfect cult of personality that rulers like Stalin and Mao only dreamed of. Today, more than six decades after its post-World War II creation, North Korea endures as a true digital-age rarity: a land largely unrecorded, even while its influence — on the global stage and the world’s imagination — intensifies.

LIFE asked five award-winning photographers to share their stories and photos — some of which have never before been published in the U.S. — from their travels in the North. The hazards of journeying to the DPKR as a Western journalist, covertly or in plain sight, are as numerous as they are dire. Shooting there requires skill, strategy, and guts; the five photojournalists here risked all to reveal the enigmatic universe behind the North Korean curtain. 

(see more — North Korea: Inside a Secret State)