I'm not trying to say "DPRK is communist", especially because I believe the Warsaw Pact countries considered themselves to be socialist, on the way to communism. What I am trying to say is that, of things that strike me as having been different between western and eastern europe in photographed culture, today's DPRK shows the same differences. So I'd consider it firmly in the "second world", insofar as that old cold war trichotomy makes any sense in the twenty-first century.

For instance, I consider "Девушки фабричные" to have been a soviet trope (an image search reveals factory girls existed in the west as well, but don't seem to have been so frequently propagandised) and sure enough, here they are in the DPRK, even clasically at textile machines:

https://dprktoday.com/content//photo/2020/20200309-pt17906-1...

https://dprktoday.com/content//photo/2020/20200112-pt17518-2...

(among the machines I spotted on the site is a mask-making machine. Covid is a common denominator this year.)