National Geographic photographer David Guttenfelder is no stranger to dangerous situations. After graduating from college, he left his life in rural Iowa to cover the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an experience that kicked off a decades-long career of reporting on war, conflict and major news events all around the world. But when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down travel to most countries, he took an assignment close to his roots—paddling the treacherously unpredictable waters between the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. He describes what it was like visiting historic lighthouses and sea caves, and share some surprising lessons he took away from that experience.
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TRANSCRIPT
(Storm sounds)
RADIO BROADCAST: Now for the Marine forecast for waters within five nautical miles of shoreline in western Lake Superior, from Port Wing to Fairfield to Saxon Harbor, Wisconsin, and the outer Apostle Islands.
PETER GWIN (HOST): It’s summer 2021. At the time of this radio broadcast, National Geographic photographer David Guttenfelder is hunkered down in a lighthouse on Devil’s Island in Lake Superior.
DAVID GUTTENFELDER (PHOTOGRAPHER): I think we spent three days on Devil's Island living in the lighthouse while eight-foot waves crashed against the shore.
GWIN: Devil’s Island is part of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. And David was on an ambitious journey to paddle to as many of the islands as possible in 18 days. But Lake Superior is notorious for its rough waters and harsh, unstable weather.
GUTTENFELDER: It was definitely a sizing up of my kayak skills.
GWIN: And on top of trying to stay afloat, he was also trying to capture photos. David recalls at one point leaving the lighthouse to check out some sea caves. But that turned out to be an adventure in itself.
GUTTENFELDER: Suddenly, the storm just came over the horizon and one of our group members said, “We've got to get out of here.” We turned and paddled as hard as we could back to the island where we had come from and made it just to the shoreline when the lightning started hitting all around us in the lake. My kayaking partners went and took shelter and I tried to make pictures.
GWIN: Classic photographer—stand out in the middle of the storm.
GUTTENFELDER: Yeah, I flipped over my boat and tried to photograph this and I watched lightning hitting in front of me and then directly overhead, clearly was hitting the island.
GWIN: Wow.
GUTTENFELDER: It was just one of the reminders while we were out there, how the lake is the boss and how it was in charge.
I’m Peter Gwin, editor at large at National Geographic magazine, and you’re listening to Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world.
This week: we talk to National Geographic Explorer David Guttenfelder. He describes leaving his first job as a photographer at a small newspaper in Iowa to cover the Rwandan genocide, and how that decision led him to photograph stories in more than 100 countries over the next two decades. So, in the midst of a career chasing headline stories around the world, what brought him back to his native Midwest to take an assignment kayaking in Lake Superior?
But first, adventure is never far away with a free one-month trial to National Geographic Digital. For starters, there’s full access to our stories online with new ones published every day; plus, every Nat Geo issue ever published is in our digital archives!
There’s a whole lot more for subscribers, and you can check it all out—for free—at natgeo.com/exploremore.
GWIN: David Guttenfelder was born and raised in a rural town in Iowa. Life in the Midwest was pretty much all he knew until he went off to college and enrolled in a foreign-exchange study program that took him to Tanzania’s largest city, Dar es Salaam.
GUTTENFELDER: I lived in the dormitories and I was like the only American guy living in the dorms with Tanzanian guys. I lived there for 18 months. I didn't speak English while I was there. I like completely and totally threw myself into this experience. And my roommate lived in the highest village on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, and we used to go there on the weekends, and I'd stay with his grandmother and I would help her do chores, feed the cows. She had three cows living inside her tiny little house with an open fire. At night, we'd sleep and the cows would lick your legs.
My whole job while I was there for 18 months was to just learn the language, learn to live outside of my own experience, my own culture. And I started taking pictures, too. I brought a little point-shoot camera, and I started taking pictures not because I thought I was going to be a journalist, but because I thought I wanted to bring back pictures of these people who had this experience that was so important to me and show my family back in Iowa.
GWIN: When David returned, those photos helped him build a portfolio that he used to apply for his first job at The Daily Iowan.
GUTTENFELDER: I think most people build a portfolio of like, news and sports. I had a portfolio of my friends and people I met in Africa, in the little villages where I traveled.
GWIN: Then in 1994, David made a life-changing decision.
GUTTENFELDER: In April 1994, the the aircraft of the president of Rwanda was shot down, which sparked civil war and the genocide of the killing of ethnic Tutsis by their neighbors with farm tools. And this mass exodus of people over the border into neighboring Zaire, now Congo and Tanzania, where I had been a student. I was sitting in Iowa with this little photography job, watching this unfold on television.
I decided then that this would be the thing—like, there was time for me to try to go and do something bigger. I'd been to Tanzania. There were people there who I cared about, who I wanted to go back and see and help. And I had the skills, I had the language. And so I quit my job and I took everything I had, probably $5,000, maybe less, $3,000. All my cameras, all my belongings I had in the world all fit into one backpack. I put it on, practiced crawling around on the floor to see if I could take pictures with everything I owned on me. Flew to Nairobi and I went to an airstrip and I literally hitchhiked on an aid flight. And I landed in Bujumbura, Burundi, and I hitchhiked on a UNHCR road convoy through Rwanda and just started trying to contribute, do something as a photographer in Rwanda.
GWIN: But you had no experience, like as a foreign correspondent, and like you're kind of just making this up as you go?
GUTTENFELDER: Yeah. Completely. I had never seen a dead person. Apart from the refugee camps, the first thing I saw in Rwanda was the Kigali Central Prison where they began locking up ethnic Hutu perpetrators of the genocide. And as far as I knew, no photojournalists had gone to that place. So I just knocked on the door and some guy opened the gate and he said, You can come in, but there's nobody here to let you out, so it's up to you. So I said yes. And I went inside and I ended up spending nearly three days photographing inside the prison—just unthinkable conditions. People packed inside, shoulder to shoulder in an open courtyard in the rain. Some bunk beds. People sleeping wherever they could.
I should say that that might have been the first place I went, but the second place I went just basically the same week was to visit two of the churches that were sort of the epicenters of the massacre. And I went to one of the churches where hundreds of hundreds of people had taken shelter and ethnic Tutsis had taken shelter and their families and the churches were surrounded and systematically attacked over the course of days, and everyone was killed inside. And I went inside, you know, I said I hadn't seen violence. I hadn't seen anything like that. I walked into the church and there were—I don't want to describe it. Just the building, the pews, full, completely full of the victims of the genocide.
GWIN: And this is how long after the events themselves?
GUTTENFELDER: Many weeks.
GWIN: And the bodies are still there?
GUTTENFEDLER: Still there. They’re still there now.
GUTTENFELDER: I wish I could say that it was the worst thing that I photographed or covered. But I think I think it just set the tone for I'm going to be this person and I can do this. I went to Rwanda thinking I was going to spend a few weeks or a couple of months until my $3,000 ran out and I'd go home with the experiences and it'd be the beginning of, you know, I'd have a portfolio. I will have contributed. I would have felt like I did something good for the world that I could do. I ended up spending the rest of my twenties in Africa and I covered only war. I went from Rwanda to Burundi, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Zaire. I spent my whole twenties doing just that.
GWIN: We could talk a lot about a lot of the coverage that you did through Africa. But I want to kind of jump ahead to the Iraq War. And I remember you telling me about being sort of assigned by the AP to to set up a bureau in Baghdad. How did you get this assignment?
GUTTENFELDER: In 2003, which was the year of the invasion of Iraq. Right. They sent me to Baghdad in January. It was January 2, during the Saddam regime rule.
GWIN: So he's still in power when you first arrive?
GUTTENFELDER: Yeah, they sent me. I was working under, like pretty tight controls of the Iraqi regime, sort of press, propaganda wing. We had to work out of this office. Couldn't go anywhere without my guide or my minder, who is this big, scary thug of a guy. I just wasn't free to completely just wander around wherever I wanted to go, always. So I came up with this idea that I would hire some—a couple of local Iraqi photographers. So I went to the Iraqi Press Photographers Association meeting and I gave a little talk. Met all the guys. I think they were all guys.
GWIN: When you give this talk in English and there's a translator there?
GUTTENFELDER: Yeah. I met all the members of the Iraqi photographers group. And I told them, if any of you would like to try and work for the AP, come to my office tomorrow and, you know, we'll do a little tryout. And two guys showed up the next day. Samir, who was middle aged and who was born with polio in his leg, was like very atrophied and he had a very difficult time walking. He sort of would hold onto his pant leg and kind of pull his leg behind him. And Karim, who was about six-foot-six and had a Cutlass Supreme Classic. And I took a look at them and their work. And I thought, oh, boy. Like, these are the guys. And I gave them each a camera and I sent them out kind of like on a test.
GWIN: Right.
GUTTENFELDER: And they came back and, surprisingly, Samir, the guy with the injured leg—for some reason, I was surprised he took this beautiful photo of this old barber who had been a member of, like, the old royal household. And he had this barber shop on the corner and this beautiful light. And so I hired him. I gave him cameras and lenses, and I told him I had X amount of. You know, X amount per picture. And I sent him out. A few weeks later, there was a really important kind of news moment. There were U.N., the heads of the U.N. weapons team came and they were staying and no one knew which hotel they were staying. So we were kind of doing like a paparazzi thing where I put myself in front of the hotel where I thought they were most likely to be. And I put the other AP staff guy into the second most likely hotel, and then I put Samir to the hotel, which I didn't think he was actually there. It turns out he was. He came out and Samir got this amazing photo that was the front of The New York Times.
GWIN: Right.
GUTTENFELDER: And the competing Reuters guys said, Yeah, well, he got that photo because that tall guy always carries him around. I said, What do you mean? You know, whenever they go on an assignment, it's always the two of them. And that big, tall guy with the Cutlass Supreme carries him. And I didn't know anything about this. Turned out that when I gave the one guy the job, they decided to work together and share the money because Samir needed a ride and he needed someone to carry him on his back. He was making all of his photos from Piggyback because he couldn't run, kind of walk. And so I called them into the office, two of them into the office. Right. And they looked at me and said, Are we fired? They thought I would be upset about it. And I was so moved by it that I ended up hiring Karim also.
When Baghdad fell, I fired all of the regime appointed Ministry of Information people that I had to work with before the war who had controlled me. And I had the staff of Karim and Samir. We brought in Samir's little brother, who was actually a hotshot photographer. There was another guy named Khalid Muhammad, who was this tough, street smart guy. He was a used car salesman, didn't know anything about photography. He just was always the first guy there and all this, there were all these bombings happening and he was always the first one there. And he had a camera with like, floppy disks. So I hired all these ragtag guys. We had people coming in with ties and portfolios applying for jobs. And I only hired these guys that I thought were survivors. And they won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. That group of Iraqis.
GWIN: After Iraq, David spent the next two decades taking photographs all over the world, including Afghanistan, Israel, India, Kenya, Japan, North Korea, and most recently, Ukraine, where he’s been covering the war.
But back in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down travel, he was back in Minnesota and got a call from an unexpected source.
GUTTENFELDER: One day I was sitting in my office in isolation and I got a phone call from someone I didn't know named Tom Irvine. He asked me if I'd ever been to the Apostle Islands, and I hadn't. Tom is the grandson and great-grandson of Apostle Islands' Lighthouse Keepers, back when lighthouse keepers were federally appointed
GWIN: Oh my gosh.
GUTTENFELDER: And he just said this is the 50th anniversary of this place that's very special to my family and very special to the organization that he heads, which is the National Parks of Lake Superior Foundation. And he said, Just go with me. We'll check it out. And I went to Wisconsin with him and kind of had my mind blown.
GWIN: What first of all, what are the Apostle Islands?
GUTTENFELDER: Well, I have to admit that I. I knew very little about the Apostle Islands myself. And, you know, it turns out they're right here in my own backyard. The Apostle Islands were the center of Ojibwe civilization, and for thousands of years, they were the heart of the Anishinaabe story of creation. It's 22 islands tucked into the southern, western corner of Lake Superior. The islands became in the mid-19th century, became a center of colonization that were completely transformed by the construction of locks and lighthouses by European settlers.
You know, European settlers built commercial fish camps, and they were mining and built quarries. And there was a massive amount of logging all across the islands to the point where in the attempt to gather natural resources and open up the famously frigid and treacherous Lake Superior, they did terrible ecological damage to the 22 islands. And so in 1970, it was named the National Lakeshore and has been stewarded by the National Park Service.
GWIN: And just to clarify – there are 22 Apostle Islands in total but 21 are counted among the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. That’s because the National Lakeshore does not include Madeline Island, the sacred homeland of the Ojibwe people—in particular, the Red Cliff Band and Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
So I asked David: how do you even go about showing what’s special about these islands?
(Paddling sounds)
(To Peter) Well, the first time I went, we went out in a little Park Service boats and I, you know, kayaked along the shorelines.
GUTTENFELDER: When I decided that I wanted to make this a National Geographic story and a National Geographic level adventure, I decided and was determined to kayak all 21 of the islands.
GWIN: Wow. You mean like kayak from one to the next, to the next to the next, like in succession?
GUTTENFELDER: That's right.
(Field tape): This is our crossing to Outer, just getting set up.
GWIN: How far is that? What kind of distance are you talking about?
GUTTENFELDER: I think by the end of it, we had paddled around 125 miles.
(Field tape) How many miles to get to the camp, to the lighthouse?
Kayaker: 11 and a half.
GUTTENFELDER (field tape): 11 to go. Not even 10am.
(To Peter) We pushed off from the shoreline in Wisconsin, a place called Little Sand Bay, and we spent about three weeks paddling from one island to the next.
(Field tape) You can go all the way out to that tip and stand in ankle deep water and it feels like you’re standing on the edge of the abyss.
GUTTENFELDER: We slept in tents, in hammocks and inside abandoned lighthouses.
(Field tape) Red-tailed hawk! You see one now?
GUTTENFELDER: And it was one of the most peaceful and adventurous experiences I've ever had.
(Field tape) I’m turning off the recorder now.
GWIN: OK, so what kind of tell me about some of the things you guys saw on the islands.
GUTTENFELDER: The Apostle Islands was made a national park in 1970. But in 2004, it was named a protected wilderness. So what we've seen in the last 50-plus years is the rewilding of this island.
And so there were signs of this, like rewilding and regeneration everywhere that we went. We walked in old growth forests on Outer Island, the most remote of all of the islands, a place that they logged to make baby furniture and baby cribs. And when the islands were suddenly protected. They just packed up and left, leaving behind all of this logging equipment, old cars, beer cans. And we bushwhacked through this old growth forest and found like the forest had completely overtaken all of this like wreckage from pre-national park, pre-post-modern wilderness—trees and vines growing through the carcasses of all of these vehicles.
GWIN: Oh my gosh. That sounds wild.
GUTTENFELDER: We found the remains of old lighthouses, the most preserved number of lighthouses in America. We found the resilience of endangered species coming back on the beaches and sandspits of the islands.
And of course, so many important Indigenous sites and people from the nearby Redcliffe Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa who are out utilizing the islands and lake. And we met a group of Ojibwe campers, young kids who were camping on Sand Island, learning from tribal elders about their connection to what was the center of civilization for the Ojibwe people.
Most interestingly, we saw just innumerable sea caves. These are caves cut through a billion year old sandstone that you can paddle your kayak back inside these very delicate archways, enormous vaulted chambers, all cut by crashing waves and melting ice and erosion. And when you would get back inside one of these, it was like paddling a kayak inside a washing machine, echoing and crashing off the walls and spinning you around. It was one of the most incredible parts of the trip.
GWIN: While out at the Apostle Islands, David recorded a few audio diaries and I asked him about this one.
GUTTENFELDER (field tape): 2020 made me do it. And it was the first time I tried to get some help and tried to understand what PTSD is all about or why I am the way I am now. I would love to explore that as a photographer, programs that take people who are really struggling, out into the wild, help them find some peace. It would be a story about, really, a wide variety of people but be a story about myself too.
GWIN: Can you talk a little bit about that clip? Like this trip, it sounds like you're kind of working through some of your own issues. And it sounds like more than just reaction to the pandemic, but some of your previous assignments in other places.
GUTTENFELDER: Yeah. I think the pandemic is obviously what we were all all across the world dealing with in 2020, 2021. But yeah, for me personally, it was a year or two of forced reflection where I was home for the first time, not constantly on the move, and took that time to try to understand and digest some of the experiences I've been through in my career as a photographer and to try and talk to someone and to make some sense of all of it. So this trip was, you know, part of that year. And it felt like one of the silver linings of what was one of the worst years of all of our lives. It was a chance to rethink things for ourselves and redirect. And then I definitely took that opportunity.
GWIN: I think a lot of people find that in nature. That seems to be a common thread that you hear about veterans coming back and finding some peace by going into nature, people that have had other traumatic experiences. What is it about like, going into the wilderness? It feels like that it transcends cultures, age groups. I don't want you to speak for humankind, but in terms of your own experience, what do you think it is about that that has such a powerful effect?
GUTTENFELDER: I would say that for me it was reaffirming something that I've always known, which is—there's always this push-pull in my brain as a documentary photographer that I need to be doing something, you know, that's front and center in everybody's imagination, some big important news event or issue. And that often means we ignore the smaller places closer to home. And that though I've always known that photographing piping plover or a national park or a community that's next door is as important. You have to be reminded of that over and over again that it has equal consequence.
If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That’s the best way to support Overheard. Go to natgeo.com/exploremore to subscribe.
For more on the Apostle Islands and their history, you can read Stephanie Pearson’s piece and see the stunning images David captured for the story.
Also, we only discussed a small fraction of the stories David has covered in his career. He’s also one of the few Westerners who has spent an extensive amount of time in North Korea. Check out the photos he took, which show a side of the country people rarely get to see.
David’s also been covering the war in Ukraine. You can check out some of his photographs from the front lines in a recent piece for the New Yorker. And you can follow him on Instagram @dguttenfelder. That’s all in your show notes. They’re right there in your podcast app.
This week’s Overheard episode is produced by Khari Douglas and Ted Woods.
Our senior producers are Brian Gutierrez and Jacob Pinter.
Our senior editor is Eli Chen.
Our manager of audio is Carla Wills.
Our executive producer of audio is Davar Ardalan.
Our photo editor is Julie Hau.
Ted Woods sound-designed this episode and Hansdale Hsu composed our theme music.
This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners.
The National Geographic Society, committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world, funds the work of National Geographic Explorer David Guttenfelder.
Michael Tribble is the vice president of integrated storytelling.
Nathan Lump is National Geographic’s editor in chief.
And I’m your host, Peter Gwin. Thanks for listening, and see y’all next time.
SHOW NOTES
For more on the Apostle Islands and their history, read writer Stephanie Pearson’s piece and see the stunning images David Guttenfelder captured while kayaking out there.
Guttenfelder is also one of the few Westerners who has spent an extensive amount of time in North Korea. The photos he took there show a side of the country people rarely get to see.
He’s also been covering the war in Ukraine. You can check out some of his photographs from the front lines in this story for The New Yorker.
You can follow David Guttenfelder on Instagram @dguttenfelder.
