A Rare Look Into the Lives of North Koreans | Nat Geo Live

• 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 known about it, is there have 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, 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 of 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 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 of 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.

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. 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. 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 it was, 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. 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.

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 kind of 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.

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." 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. 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 in the country, and they would take it away and lock it up in a box. In 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 museum series on my Instagram account.

So every day, I would go out to some new and strange place. This was a flower festival for their national flowers, the Kimjongilia and the Kimilsungia. 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. 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. People would ask me questions, and I would answer them. 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. 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 you 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.