I t's no beach holiday, but a trip to North Korea is a guarantee that you will get away from it all. Charlie Crane, the young British photographer behind Welcome to Pyongyang, a new photo guidebook to North Korea's capital, describes the experience.

"There's nowhere else like it," the 32-year-old told the Weekend Standard. "There's an immense feeling of isolation. You feel so detached from the outside world. Everything is North Korean. There's nothing from the outside world, no McDonald's, no neon, no signs of corporations. And they take your mobile phone off you at customs."

Phones are returned to owners on departure.

"I love it," he says.

Not quite bulky enough to be a coffee table book, Welcome to Pyongyang is an A5-size collection of some 60-odd photos of the city's monuments and people, each one accompanied with a snippet of text - mini-interviews with official tourist guides about the accompanying scene. The collection covers places you'd expect to see on a tour itinerary such as the Grand People's Study House, the Korean Revolution Museum and the Juche Tower; places you'd inevitably pass through such as hotels, souvenir shops and the metro; and everyday places that are tour worthy only because it's North Korea - a petrol station, a middle school, a barbershop and a maternity hospital. Crane used a large format camera, ideal for the landscape, architectural and portrait shots he took in three trips to Pyongyang - or some 25 days - between 2005 and 2006.

The result is a surreal series of formal images that seem to hail from a bygone era: cityscapes of boxy Soviet-style tower blocks are capped with leaden skies; avenues are ghost-like, largely devoid of traffic or pedestrians; the narrow depth of field gives portrait shots a cartoon, cutout effect; subjects invariably hold themselves stiff and unsmiling and are dressed in prim uniforms, communist kitsch or, more often, traditional Korean costumes.

Part of the reason behind this is the fact that Crane opted for a large format camera, whose operation is slower than 35mm models.

"When we took pictures of people we asked them to stand still and to stand straight, because that's the way the camera works," says Nick Bonner, collaborator and producer of the book. Bonner, a British expatriate in Beijing, has been running Koryo Tours, a travel service taking Westerners to North Korea, since 1993. "Koreans do smile," he laughs. "They smile all over the place!"

Bonner admits that they edited people out of some shots, particularly those of monuments. "It's on purpose not to have people," he says. "You'd get distracted from the imagery otherwise. For the close-ups, we would just tell people to go away."

Another reason is that Crane wanted the series of photos to have some commonality of style.

"I wanted there to be continuity throughout the collection," he says. "I wanted to do the whole thing systematically, to treat everything the same way."

Crane chose to shoot his outdoor work when the sky was overcast.

"A lot of the time, especially in the morning, Pyongyang is misty, and on the first shoot it was really misty," he says. "I thought: this sets a really nice tone. So I wanted to keep all the photos like that - if it was sunny and blue skies I wouldn't shoot."

And the smiling?

"When you ask someone to stand there while you take their picture, they tend not to smile, and if they did smile I would ask them not to," he adds.

There's no doubt that Crane achieved his continuity, but perhaps the most stunning shot in the collection is one which doesn't fit the mould. It's a head shot of a "Miss Kim," a waitress on the Pyongyang Number One Paddle Boat. Unlike the bulk of others, where the subject stands inside or next to their associated building and stares at the camera, Miss Kim is photographed against a grey background and gazes confidently into the distance. She is stunning, her skin flawless, and the shot is so clear you can almost see the camera reflected in her irises.

"They say Pyongyang women are the most beautiful in Korea," runs the accompanying text, a translation from the local guide. "Miss Kim says she is not beautiful but she looks alright."

The book doesn't pretend to reveal any secrets. It's basically what you would see if you went to North Korea as a tourist, says Crane. Visitors to the country are always accompanied by two guides, they are never free to wander off by themselves, and they need to ask permission if they want to take photographs.

Bonner says the North Korean authorities, in giving them permission to do the book, accepted their list of sights and interview questions to the guides, without exception. But Crane says he was prevented from taking some photos.

"They wouldn't let me take a photo of a soldier and also I couldn't photograph the mausoleum," he says. "Sometimes there's neither rhyme nor reason behind why you can't do something in North Korea. You ask, can I go over there and they just say, `no,"' he laughs.

"The guides are there to keep you in line. In the beginning they worry about what you're going to get up to. But after a few days we won their trust and it was much easier."

For Bonner, also, it was a chance to capture what he considers a beautiful city. Pyongyang was leveled after the Korean War, leaving urban planners a clean slate to build their socialist utopia. "A people's paradise," says Bonner.

"It's a stunning city," he adds. "It's got more green space than the majority of cities and anyone who goes will tell you it is an extremely beautiful and well laid out city. It's got tramways, a metro and the Taedong River goes right through the center. It's a pretty cool place."

While there's no evidence of a "paradise," the photos do convey a sense of order and ghostly grandeur. For example, the platform is bare in the shot of Puhung Metro Station. Lit by fancy chandeliers, it looks more like a ballroom than an underground.

But then, "the weird becomes normal in North Korea," says Crane.

The interviews with the guides are meant to add a sense of humanity to this rather formal photographic tour of Pyongyang. "You get these mammoth buildings and this guy - the guide - is the interface who interprets that building for you," Bonner says. "We wanted their thoughts on what you see."

And in some ways, what they say is more revealing about North Koreans than the photos themselves. Common to most is a subscription to the Juche system - the official state ideology of national self-reliance - a sense of pride in their country, a devotion to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-il, and on a personal level, a simplicity and humbleness. Take the picture of a student at the Atomic Power Faculty of Kim Il Sung University. A girl sits reading at a concrete table in front of a copse of trees. The text reads: "As everyone knows, we recently held a successful nuclear test explosion and we are very proud of our scientists who are working to build a strong country." This photo is Crane's professed favorite.

Bonner says the text comes verbatim from the guides, although "some of it is paraphrased, because they do go on a bit." While much of it sounds like "officialspeak" there is a kind of off- beat humor. One guide bemoans his tardy Western tourists: "I spend a lot of time in the [hotel] lobby waiting;" another recommends long-haired foreigners go to the women's hairdressers instead of the barbershop; while a third thinks foreigners like to buy small items like chopsticks and cloth dolls from the souvenir shop because they don't have much space in their luggage.

We learn that it is not compulsory for women to join the army, that they are generally married by age 28, arranged marriages are getting less common, medical care is free for everyone, little Korean girls prefer cats as pets, and that the Koryo Hotel serves Western breakfasts for those who find Korean food too "spicy or strange."

One of the reasons Bonner says he wanted to do this book was to show a level of humanity behind the North Korea that we see on our TV screens.

"If you watch any footage it's either nuclear workers in white coats or soldiers goose-stepping," he says.

He opens his laptop to show photos he took during a film festival in Pyongyang last year. The shots are of the audience crippled with laughter, faces split into enormous grins, heads thrown back, eyes wide with disbelief. They are watching a screening of Mr Bean for the first time, says Bonner.

There's no argument that Crane did a great job, professionally, with Welcome to Pyongyang - the British Journal of Photography chose his North Korean work for its 2006 photographic award. There's also no doubt that the book offers a rare glimpse into an isolated city - less than 2,000 Western tourists visit there a year. But if Bonner wanted to convey a sense of humanity, the collection's stiff formal treatment of Pyongyang and its people and the surreal interview text does little to expose the common heart of this secretive nation.

Welcome to Pyongyang by Charlie Crane is published by Chris Boot