Yahoo Lifestyle Why @everydayDPRK Is Not Your Average Instagram Account
Photos: @everydayDPRK
An Instagram account is usually the stuff of green smoothies and beachside sunsets. Not so photojournalist David Guttenfelder’s @everydayDPRK Instagram page. Instead, the 45-year-old American uses Instagram to offer an unprecedented look at everyday life inside one of the world’s most repressive and secretive nations: North Korea.
http://instagram.com/everydaydprk
Guttenfelder, who has travelled regularly to the country over the past 15 years, started the account in 2014 “to show the real people, the real lives, and not just a state-sponsored view of the country”, he explains. The images that the account (which has 24,200 followers) shares are fascinating in their normality – workers on their daily commute, teens lining up at a water park, a woman on top of a lookout tower in traditional dress, her skirts blowing in the wind.
“It sounds elementary to say this, but outside the hostile relationship North Korea has with the world, there’s real people there with real lives,” he says. “People take the bus to work in the morning, they play sport in the park, they fall in love. These are normal struggles that aren’t unique to North Korea. There are so many things that we share.”
Since its inception in September last year, the account has added six other contributors – none of them professional photographers. Andrea Lee (@andreauri), a New York-based tour operator who travels often to North Korea, is one of them. “There’s an incredible raw beauty to the country,” she says. “People don’t always see that.”
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