The woman in the orange hi-viz vest must be a rescue worker; she has a hard hat in her gloved right hand and gouts of blood running down her bare left arm. Her stance is heroic, nearly monumental, and her smoke-blackened face is brightly lit as she stares into the distance. The South Korean photographer Anna Lim’s series “Rehearsal of Anxiety,” which dramatizes tensions between her home country and North Korea, contains a handful of such portraits. A firefighter, likewise dishevelled, faces the camera pensively, with his visor up and breathing apparatus down. Again, the lighting is sumptuous—odd for the scene of an emergency. Lim’s other close studies of individuals are stranger still. An image of a woman in a bloodstained blue shirt has been cropped along the subject’s mouth by the upper edge of the picture—she seems to be looking up, grimacing. Is the disaster to be found somewhere in these photographs, or has it been wrought by the act of photography itself?

Earlier this year, “Rehearsal of Anxiety” was the centerpiece of Lim’s portfolio when she won the opening-week Photo Folio Review prize at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. As a result, Lim’s work will be shown as part of the main festival, this coming summer. Compared to her series as a whole, Lim’s single portraits are unusual in their ambiguity. Most of the photographs are more populated and manifestly staged. Starting in 2016, Lim spent three years photographing volunteers—a hundred and nine in total—at a variety of urban locations, including Seoul’s Hangang Park, City Hall plaza, and sites used for disaster-preparedness training. (In South Korea, civil-defense exercises are carried out roughly twice a year.) Lim’s participants have been given fake wounds and are arranged to show how the moments following a nuclear strike from North Korea or a terrorist attack with a dirty bomb might unfold. Theatrically seems to be one answer: the survivors look only superficially harmed, but their faces say something else. As Lim told me recently by e-mail, her volunteers worked hard “to express their latent feelings of insecurity, anger, and grief, and to share them together.”