- It's fair to say
that North Korea
is one of the most isolated,
least understood
places on Earth.
Part of the reason that
it is so misunderstood
and nothing is know about it,
is there's been
very few photographs
that have ever been taken there.
(applause)
The Associated Press in 2011
came up with the idea to open
an office in North Korea,
and I begged them to let me
be the Pyongyang photographer
if it worked.
And they did.
I went there, and that
meant that I was the first
western photographer to ever
have regular access
to the country.
And between then and now,
I've made about 40 almost
50 trips to North Korea.
It was a very difficult
place to work,
unlike any other.
You can't just
move around freely
and do whatever you want.
A guide goes with
you everywhere,
and they are sort of half
facilitator, half babysitter.
They didn't censor what I did,
they didn't put their
hand in front of my lens.
But they did have a
very different idea
of how I should be
portraying their country.
In fact they had a
very different idea
of what photojournalism
is completely.
The word propagandist is not
a dirty word in North Korea,
it's what they do at
their news agency.
But I went there, I
think, with an open mind,
and a free mind,
and a point of view.
This is their version of NASA.
(laughing)
On the week that
the North Koreans
were going to test
fire a missile,
the whole world
was condemning them
and saying that it was
a test of a
nuclear-capable rocket.
The North Koreans
were saying no,
this is a rocket we're
gonna put into space
to put a weather satellite.
So they took us there,
so that I could photograph it.
This is the best
example what my job was
while I was in North Korea.
I was interpreting reality,
trying to decide what was
real and what was not real.
And I did that
through photography.
Through the content
of photography,
but also the composition,
the humor, the whimsy.
I wasn't the (laughing)
senior most American diplomat
in North Korea.
It was this guy.
Here he is smoking
a cigar in the gym,
helping pick the
national basketball team.
Dennis Rodman.
I covered the spectacles
and the propaganda.
This was a mass
synchronized swimming event
for the birthday of the leader.
They were swimming
or dancing to a song
called We Will Defend Kim
Jong-un With our Very Lives.
And this is the national
football stadium.
They hold this thing that
they call mass games.
It's like a wonder of the world.
100,000 people in the stands,
holding these books
with colored pages,
and they flip them, and they
create these mass mosaics.
They look like little pixels,
but you with a long enough lens,
you can see that they're
actually human pixels,
little faces peeking over
the tops of the books.
Eggs with legs. (laughing)
Sometimes you just
have to photograph
whatever's right
in front of you.
(laughing)
You don't really
have to try so hard.
That's kind the way I
worked everywhere I went.
You know if they took me to
a patriotic flag factory,
or a school for performing arts,
I just pretty much photographed
what was in front of me.
I thought it was
revealing to show
how the Koreans wanted
to present themselves
and their country.
And over time I got
further and further away
from the spectacles and
away from the capital
and out into places that
really no other foreigners
had ever been.
And certainly very few
photographers had ever seen.
And maybe it was even
more important to me,
that I found my way
into people's homes
and into people's offices.
Like this woman,
who's a secretary at the
Korean Central News Agency,
with her little
aquarium full of fish.
And I could look
into people's eyes
and feel like I actually could
make a connection to Koreans.
I traveled with then Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright.
As she met with then
leader Kim Jong-il.
We stood in this Wizard
of Oz looking palace,
and we were all alone waiting
for him to come in the room.
And she looked at me and said,
"what should I do,
where should I stand?"
And I said, "I have no idea."
(laughing)
We stood on these big flowers,
and then the door
opened and he walked in.
And it was like
I'd only seen this
kind of fantasy
in a movie before.
And it was like he just
stepped out of the screen
into this room.
It was the first time
that I understood
how I connected to that country
and how surreal and how I
connected as a photographer.
But also it was the
first time I realized
how important the work
that I could do there,
if I could only invest my
time and commit to the place.
Now it wasn't easy
at the beginning.
Everyone watches you there.
And on my first trip
with Madeleine Albright,
when I came out of the airport,
they drew the
drapes on the bus.
They put black plastic over
the windows of my hotel.
I couldn't see out.
I felt like there was
nothing real out there,
it was all just a facade.
But over the years,
through photography,
I could peek around out to the
other side of those curtains.
And I came to understand
that there was real life
in North Korea.
And through my pictures,
I tried to take everybody
else on that same journey.
There was no better
place than North Korea
to test the power
of photography.
Photography carries
meaning and mood
in ways that writing or
any other medium can't.
So when this pale pink
curtain comes down,
just covers the eyes of
the people in Pyongyang,
I can say something that
I couldn't say in words.
And photography has multiple
meanings and interpretations.
This is kinda how
I survived there,
the line that I walked.
This was a vocational
school for children
to teach them how to be farmers.
The Koreans took me there,
and they were very
proud to show me
this very high-tech
tractor simulator.
Of course for people outside,
they see it differently.
We see their care and their
love for their children,
but to us this is
a practice tractor
with this sort of DOS-level
computer terminal on top.
We had a lot of
very tough arguments
about why did you
take that photograph?
We saw that picture, that
doesn't make us look good.
But I could always fall
back on photography.
I could hold it up and say,
this is what I saw, I was there.
This is what we saw.
I used many different
camera formats,
not just to be arty,
but because of the cat and
mouse game I had to play
when I worked.
This is an old-fashioned
camera they don't make anymore,
a Hasselblad XPan,
a film camera.
I wore it around my neck.
I had a cable release so I
could just talk and smile
and take pictures.
And I had a little carpenter's
level in the flash mount
so I could make sure that my
horizons were all straight.
And when I picked up my big
fancy National Geographic camera
sometimes people were
a bit intimidated,
and the guides certainly watched
me a little more closely.
But when I used this one,
they would say aw that's just
David's old-tiny camera.
And I did the same
with my mobile phone.
I took my mobile phone
into North Korea.
Everybody by now is a
mobile phone photographer.
We all are, even
the North Koreans
take pictures with their
phones, believe it or not.
And I was able to do
things that I couldn't do
with my big cameras.
It was normal for them
to see me with a mobile
phone taking pictures.
And I would also
stop and photograph
things that I wouldn't
normally notice
if I was working as
a photojournalist.
Things that you rush
past on your way
to telling the news,
things that are simple
little still lives
that make up the life around you
and are pieces of the puzzle
in explaining a country
like North Korea.
But they didn't
allow mobile phones
into the country until 2013.
Used to be I would
arrive at the country,
and they would take it away
and lock it up in a box.
2013 they suddenly said,
oh foreigners can bring their
phones into the country.
Not only that, but they opened
a 3G Network, Koryolink.
And you could do everything
that we do anywhere
with our phones, right in
the streets of North Korea.
Suddenly I was sending
pictures to the world,
tens of thousands of
people following me,
right from a village
or on the streets.
And that way, sort
of everything became
worthy of photography, worthy
of my attention I think,
a piece in the puzzle.
I started buying things,
collecting things,
and photographing them,
and putting them out on
my Instagram account.
I started an artifacts series,
North Korean artifact 101, 102.
This was the first one, The
Great Teacher of Journalists,
a book I bought in the bookshop.
North Korean artifact 102,
Mountain Mushroom Moonshine.
(laughing)
Hangover Chaser Tea (laughing)
I think this one
was made for export.
Money that was no
longer in circulation,
a debit card from the bank,
sheet music for piano, a
cookbook from North Korea.
Here's a good one.
The Intercontinental
Ballistic Missile Test Firing
Commemorative Greeting Card.
(laughing)
And these were hedgehog
quill toothpicks.
I photographed them all,
and they became this sort of
popular like museum series
on my Instagram account.
So everyday I would
go out to some
new and strange place.
This was a flower festival
for their national flowers,
the Kimjongilia
and the Kimilsungia.
And I would go back to my hotel,
and I would send
my pictures back
to the newspapers and magazines,
and I would post
these on Instagram.
And I had nothing else to do.
The only thing that I could do
was watch state sponsored
propaganda on TV.
So I would sit and read
the comments on Instagram.
And people would
ask me questions.
And I would answer them.
And they would have
all these stereotypes,
and I would get into arguments,
and it was my form of
entertainment while I was there.
They call them
followers on Instagram,
but it felt like that, it
felt like they followed me out
into the field,
that they were with
me when I was there.
They became interested
in North Korea,
they became invested in
me and what I was doing.
And it was a very
different experience
than I'd ever had as
a photojournalist,
instead of just publishing 
at people.
It was a more
dynamic conversation.
And it wasn't just Instagram.
I was doing all social media
with my phone in North Korea.
Instagram, I was Tweeting,
I started using Foursquare.
I rated and did restaurant
reviews in Pyongyang.
And I opened up
Google Maps one day,
and I saw that it was
practically empty.
And so through Foursquare I
started plotting red flags,
naming streets, naming
intersections and buildings.
Where else in the
world can you feel like
in the 21st century,
feel like a National
Geographic explorer
from the 19th century?
Besides North Korea,
with a mobile phone.
All I really wanted
to do when I was there
was just open a
window onto a country
that people knew nothing about.
To get past all the geopolitics
and all the saber
rattling between countries
and to show that some young
army conscript like that
was a real person,
to show that there was
something worth understanding
and worth discovering there.
