Jimmy Nelson (photographer)

James Philip Nelson was born in 1967 in Sevenoaks, Kent.[1] He spent his childhood in Africa, Asia and South America, traveling around with his father, who worked as a geologist for International Shell. At the age of 7, he was sent to Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire, UK. When he was 16, he suffered from Alopecia totalis, a condition in which all the hair falls out, which was caused by a culmination of stress and a reaction to malaria medication.[2]

In 1985, at age 17, he left his boarding school and started to trek the length of Tibet on foot. He took a small camera on his trip and photographed his journey, which lasted about two years.[3] Upon return, the collection of pictures he had taken in the formerly inaccessible country were published by the English National Geographic, to wide international acclaim.[4]

Following this journey, Nelson embarked on more trips, documenting a variety of war zones, including Afghanistan, Kashmir, Yugoslavia, Somalia and El Salvador, and started to work as a professional photojournalist, until the age of 24.[2]

In 1992 Nelson was commissioned by Shell Oil to produce the book "Literary Portraits of China". He travelled across the country for 30 months, together with his then wife, Ashkaine Hora Adema, who participated in the making of the book, and became the subsequent business partner of Nelson.

From 1997 and onwards, Nelson began working in the commercial advertising field. During this time, he continued collecting images of remote and isolated cultures.[5]

The Jimmy Nelson Foundation is a nonprofit organisation founded in 2016 to stimulate cultural expression by facilitating projects that promote the heritage of indigenous cultures.[12]

Nelson says, "The foundation has evolved into teaching indigenous peoples’ pride. I'm creating many teams to go off around the world and do what I do. We’re gathering [pictures, video and other information] and creating a digital fireplace, sort of like a library in the sky, of all this heritage for future generations."[13]

The Foundation's most prominent project involved a collaboration with J. Walter Thompson India and J. Walter Thompson Amsterdam. The campaign opened with a short film, titled Blink. And they’re gone., made using more than 1,500 photographs taken by Nelson during his travels. The film took 90 days to edit, and includes images of the Huli Wigmen from Papua New Guinea, the Kazakhs of Mongolia, the Sadhus of India, the Wodaabe from Chad and a number of other cultures. The film was directed by JWT India's chief creative officer, Senthil Kumar in Mumbai, working closely with J. Walter Thompson's global creative lead, Bas Korsten.[14][15]

Nelson's work has been the subject of much criticism from a variety of sources, including the very people he photographs and represents in his book.[16] In June 2014 Nelson's project Before They Pass Away came under attack from Stephen Corry, director of Survival International , the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights. In a review titled "Turning a Blind Eye to Pure Old Vibrations" published on the Truthout website, Corry attacked Nelson's work for presenting a false and damaging picture of tribal peoples.[17] Corry maintained that Nelson's pictures bore little relationship either to how the people look now, or to how they've ever appeared.[17]

Corry writes, "In his photos of the Waorani Indians of Ecuador, he has them unclothed except for their traditional waist string. The Indians are not only shorn of their everyday clothes, but also of other manufactured ornaments such as watches and hair clips. In real life, contacted Waorani have routinely worn clothes for at least a generation, unless, that is, they are 'dressing up' for tourists. […] His Waorani female models have now preserved their modesty by tying 'fig' leaves into their waist string, which they would never have done formerly: the images look like a throwback to a past era, but they're also a contemporary invention."[17] Corry goes on to allege that Nelson not only presents a fictionalised portrait of tribal people, but more importantly that he glosses over the violence to which many of the tribes pictured are being subjected and fails to mention, that many minority peoples, especially tribal ones, are not "disappearing", but that they are being destroyed through illegal theft of their land and resources.[17]

Nelson defended his work against the criticism of Survival International in a BBC interview, explaining, "The pictures are definitely arranged. People don't naturally stand under a waterfall at 7 am waiting for the sun to rise, unless you ask them to. I’m presenting these people in a way that hasn't been done before. We present ourselves in the developed world in a very idealised, stylised way because we believe we are important. I’ve given them the time, the respect that we would give ourselves..."[5]

Nelson denies exploiting any of the indigenous communities,  and claims that only after gaining trust and understanding of their culture they grant him access.[13] In an article published in The Times, Nelson defended his book by saying that it was never meant to be reportage, but an "aesthetic, romantic, subjective, iconographic representation of people who are normally represented in a very patronising and demeaning way."[18]

Papuan tribal leader Benny Wenda has also criticized Nelson for describing his tribe as "headhunters", when in fact the Dani have never practised cannibalism. Mr Wenda said: “The real headhunters are the Indonesian military who have been killing my people. My people are still strong and we fight for our freedom. We are not ‘passing away,’ we are being killed by the brutal Indonesian soldiers. That is the truth.”[19]

Nelson's work has also been criticized for harmful inaccuracies and generalizations, which Nelson uses to make himself and his photography look good, but which harm the cause of the tribal people he is using. Julia Lagoutte writes in the OpenDemocracy: "It is simply not true that tribal people have been "unchanged for thousands of years"; they have been evolving constantly, as we have. It is clear that for Nelson, their attraction and purity is rooted in their exclusion from the future, and their containment to the past – so that is the only reality he presents in his photos. By omitting their interactions with the ‘modern world’ that they are a part of, and perpetuating the myth that they are dying out, Nelson's work freezes tribal peoples in the past and effectively denies them a place in this world."[20]

Lagoutte writes "It is staggering that Nelson can mention Huli anger at having had their land exploited in the past but make no mention of the current nightmarish situation of Papuan tribes, who face systematic rape, torture, arbitrary arrest and murder under Indonesia's racist military occupation."[20]

"The title [Before They Pass Away] was melodramatic," Nelson said in an interview with WBUR. "A little naive. Everyone got upset saying, "Who's dying?" It was a little bit naive, but then it actually paid off because it caused a big discussion."[16]

Nelson also received criticism from fellow photographers, such as Timothy Allen, a veteran photographer for the BBC's Human Planet. He states that, "the patronizing and self-aggrandizing narrative behind 'Before They Pass Away' is literally painful to watch."[4]

With his last project, Homage to Humanity, Nelson claims to have listened to the criticism. 'Before They Pass Away' sparked what was sometimes quite a positive but otherwise heated conversation... In Homage to Humanity I wanted to give more of a voice to the subjects—their dreams and their opinions and their worldview."[4]

Nelson was married to his wife, Ashkaine Hora Adema for 23 years, and as of 2018, they separated.[21] Nelson and Adema have three children together.[22][21] Nelson is currently based in Amsterdam, where his company Jimmy Nelson Pictures B.V. is located.[5]

• Nelson, James Philip (1995). Literary Portraits of China. with contributions by Ashkaine Hora Adema, Nigel Cameron, How Man Wong. Odyssey. ISBN 9622174051 – via Google Books.
• Nelson, Jimmy (2009). Before They Pass Away. teNeues. ISBN 9783832733186 – via Google Books.
• Nelson, Jimmy (2018). Homage To Humanity. Donna Karan (Foreword), Mundiya Kepanga (Foreword). Rizzoli International Publications. ISBN 978-0847862146 – via Google Books.

• Edward S. Curtis, American photographer whose work focused on the American West and on Native American peoples
• Felipe Lettersten, sculptor who cast sculptures of indigenous people
• Photography by indigenous peoples of the Americas
• Salvage ethnography

• • Before they pass away (TEDxAmsterdam 2013)
  • "Gorgeous portraits of the world's vanishing people" (TEDGlobal 2014)
• Exhibition in Brussels – 9 December 2016 to 25 March 2017
• Blink. And they are gone.  Jimmy Nelson x J. WALTER THOMPSON

Jimmy Nelson at TED