Based in Tokyo, David Guttenfelder is currently the Chief Asia Photographer for the Associated Press. He began as a freelance photographer in East Africa, after studying Swahili at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and has spent his entire career working and living outside of his native United States.
Guttenfelder has been granted unprecedented access to parts of North Korea, making more than 20 trips into the country since 2001. He hopes to retain a critical eye, and look past the point-counterpoint of Pyongyang and Washington to photograph the lives of everyday North Koreans and to open a window onto their world that would otherwise rarely be seen by outsiders.
Guttenfelder has won seven World Press Awards and recently received two Overseas Press Club awards, the Olivier Rebbot Award for best photographic reporting from abroad, and the Feature Photography Award for best feature photography for his coverage of the Nuclear Exclusion Zone after the Tsunami in Japan and for his daily life pictures inside North Korea. He has been seven-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Guttenfelder graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology.
David Guttenfelder is the recipient of the 2013 ICP Infinity Award for Photojournalism.