- 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.