About K-Scar

K-Scar is a photographic and narrative documentary project on internet focused on the division of Korea, exploring the geographical, historical, cultural, and social dimensions of the inter-Korean border and the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). It is designed and produced by Seoul-based journalist Roland de Courson.

This is a personal and independent body of work based on the author’s travels between 2023 and 2026 in the border areas of South Korea. Its purpose is to increase awareness of the division of the Korean Peninsula, primarily for foreign audiences.

K-Scar was featured in January 2026 on NK News, a leading media specialized on North Korea based in Seoul.

Roland de Courson is a French journalist born in Spain (Madrid, 1970).

After graduating from the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme de Lille, in France, he started his carreer as a local reporter in several French-language media in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada.

He joined Agence France-Presse (AFP), an international news agency, in 1994 and has since been based in Paris, Madrid, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Since 2022, he is a global news editor in Seoul, South Korea.

Roland, who is also a certified multimedia designer and developer from the Gobelins School of Image in Paris, was the founder and the editor of the AFP Blogs (Correspondent, Making-of) which became the couch for all the agency’s photographers and other reporters confronted with life-changing or traumatic situations during their assignments. Some of these testimonies have been compiled in a book in French, Qu’auriez vous fait à ma place ? (“What would you have done in my place?”) published in 2017.

Roland’s main personal focus since arriving in South Korea in 2022 has been to document the Korean Division, but he has also worked on many other topics in the country and beyond.

Visit the author’s website: roc-photo.net

Acknowledgements

The author would like to extend his warmest thanks to all those who helped and/or encouraged him in this project, and in particular: Kim Dae-nyeon, Suh Minji, Anthony Wallace, Pedro Pardo, Cat Barton, Frédéric Weber, June Bird, Jung Chan-moon, Jonathan Kim, Lee Ki-chan, Park Jongwoo, Lionel Djavad-Nia.