Jimmy Nelson

Jimmy Nelson – A childhood filled with travel, first successes with pictures of Tibet

Born in 1967 in Sevenoaks in the English county of Kent, Jimmy Nelson did not spend his childhood in the traditional rural surroundings of his homeland, but in Africa, Asia and South America. There he came into contact with foreign cultures from an early age, thanks to his father who travelled the world as a geologist for the company Shell. Nelson was not interested in oil or gas, however, but in people. At the age of seven he was sent to the Jesuit boarding school Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, and at 16 suffered from pathological hair loss due to stress and malaria medication. This did not put him off travelling, however, and shortly after his recovery, Nelson left the school and undertook a two-year walk through Tibet. In his pack he had a small camera to capture his impressions. The pictures from this country, at that time difficult to access, met with keen interest on his return and appeared in the National Geographic magazine.

The indigenous cultures of the world in highly polished advertising aesthetics

With this early success, Jimmy Nelson had found his purpose, and in the years that followed, he travelled greatly to Afghanistan, Somalia and former Yugoslavia, to name a few. By the age of 24 he had already travelled most of the world and captured it in much-acclaimed pictures. Like his father, he joined the Shell company and shot a large-scale photo book about China, exploring the country for this purpose for around 30 months. In 1997, Jimmy Nelson turned to advertising photography, but retained his fundamental interest in the representation of indigenous peoples and tribal cultures. The fusing of the deliberately idealised advertising aesthetic with the ethnic motifs resulted in magnificent images that delighted a large audience, but also drew criticism. Nelson’s depictions seemed too wonderful, too perfect – and the artist freely admitted that he sometimes deliberately arranged his models to achieve the desired impression. 

More beautiful than reality: People as fairy tales

Jimmy Nelson wished there could be a campfire around which the peoples of the world would sit and develop an understanding for each other. With this in mind, he especially wanted to memorialise the little-known and little-noticed indigenous cultures. Not all those portrayed are equally understanding of this kind of representation: Often the image no longer corresponds to reality, but to an ideal of the artist. Jimmy Nelson accepted this because he believed only in this way could he achieve a sufficient level of attention for his goals. As an artist, he is a dreamer, a romantic – and also a little bit of an illusionist. This strategy works with his audience, and even sceptics have to admit that Jimmy Nelson’s visual worlds have an appeal that can hardly be ignored. Nelson also intends for perhaps his most famous project, the book Before They Pass Away, financed by the Dutch billionaire Marcel Boekhoorn, to be made into a film. Naturally in fairytale-like images, undisturbed by the sometimes oppressive shadows of reality.