An Intimate, Exclusive Interview With JIMMY NELSON

What I shared with the readers here, my intensely personal story; I have never shared that openly before. Up until several years ago, I was a secret. Nobody knew. I assume that’s why they didn't understand why I'm doing this. This is not anthropology. It’s not ethnology. It’s not journalism. It’s not statistics. It is an emotional way of connecting. It’s art."
– Jimmy Nelson

Jimmy Nelson (Sevenoaks, Kent, 1967) started working as a photographer in 1987. Having spent ten years at a Jesuit boarding school in the North of England, he set off on his own to traverse the length of Tibet on foot. The journey lasted a year, and upon his return, his unique visual diary, featuring revealing images of a previously inaccessible Tibet, was published to wide international acclaim.

In early 1994 he and his Dutch ex-wife produced Literary Portraits of China, a 30-month project that brought them to all the hidden corners of the newly opening People’s Republic. Upon its completion, the images were exhibited at the People’s Palace on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, followed by a worldwide tour.

From 1997 onwards, Jimmy began to successfully undertake commercial advertising assignments for many of the world’s leading brands. He also started accumulating images of remote and unique cultures photographed with a traditional 50-year-old plate camera, and awards followed. International exhibitions and acclaim created the subsequent momentum and enthusiasm for the initiation of "Before They Pass Away" in 2010, the Jimmy Nelson Foundation, founded in 2016, and "Homage to Humanity" in 2018.

This is a great pleasure featuring an intimate and exclusive interview with Jimmy Nelson, sharing his most touching stories behind his life journey.

The original interview was published in Lens Magazine January 2021 Issue #74

Dare to go on a different journey—a journey of self-fulfillment, self-observation, and self-connection. Use your camera rather than looking for external gratification."
– Jimmy Nelson

JOSÉ JEULAND: Thank you for this interview, Jimmy. It’s a pleasure to have you here; we have so many things to discuss. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? How did your photography journey start?

JIMMY NELSON: Yes, which means I've got to take you back a long time ago. I'm 52 years old. I first started traveling in the developing world when I was a baby. My father was a geologist. He collected stones, worked for an oil company, and every year we moved to a different destination, mostly in South America. For the first seven years of my life, I lived a very free, metaphorically naked existence. I felt a little bit like Mowgli from Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. I lived in many different countries and cultures. But before the age of seven, my parents sent me to the U.K. to an institution, a Catholic Jesuit boarding school, with 1000 children and 400 Catholic Jesuit priests. It was a bit like a seminary, more like a prison.

Back then, I would spend 10 months of the year living there and two months of the year visiting my parents, wherever they lived in the world at that time. What happened when I arrived at the Catholic Jesuit boarding school was quite confrontational. First of all, I couldn't read or write because I have been living in Bush (In different cultures), so they said: "You are stupid." So that was the first label. The second label was that I have only colored friends, but I lived in Africa, so they were all colored. So they said, "all your friends are black."

I'd never understood the difference between their color of skin. Cause I was a child. So I'm stupid, and I have the wrong friends. Then, because they were traditional Catholic priests and we were lots of little children wearing shorts, four of the 400 priests were very bad, and they sexually horribly abused a number of us. So you come from extreme trust of the world to extreme abuse. In that process, I disconnected from any form of emotion. I stopped feeling anything because it was quite severe.

I spent my childhood living in this bipolar existence of looking at my body, which I hated because of the abuse. As I reached the age of 16, entering puberty, while