The astonishing photos show bleak, colourless landscapes and run-down towns and cities with a noticeable lack of vehicles.
Farm workers are pictured using rudimentary tools and machinery while others are shown cycling in what appear to be eerily deserted streets.
The photos were taken along the eastern and northeastern coast of North Korea near its border with China.
They show how most ordinary North Koreans struggle to survive in grinding poverty.
Only Communist Party loyalists are allowed to live in the capital Pyongyang and those in smaller towns and cities or rural areas are forced to eke out a living.
Soldiers have been ordered to steal crops from farmers’ fields to subsidise their meagre diets and the poor health of a recent defector pointed to chronic malnourishment.
Conditions have improved since the Nineties when hundreds of thousands of North Koreans perished after a combination of bad weather, chronic agricultural mismanagement, the end of the Soviet Union’s food subsidies caused widespread famine.
The state’s Public Distribution System (PDS) of rationing collapsed and has never fully recovered its ability to feed the population.
But according the UN World Food Programme, 18 million of North Korea’s 25 million people are dependent on state rationing, and an equal number of people are estimated to suffer from food poverty with 41 per cent of the population considered to be undernourished.
There are fears the horrors of the famine – a period the country’s leaders refer to as the “Arduous March” – will return as trade sanctions imposed in response to Kim Jong-un’s nuclear missile test program begin to bite and food shortages worsen.
This year’s harvest was thought to have been particularly poor, according to a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report which showed rainfall between April and June was lower than the same period in 2001, when cereal production reached an unprecedented low.
The country’s poverty stands in stark contrast to the millions spent on Kim Jong-un’s missile program which sparked free outrage this week with the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan.