Jimmy Nelson’s exhibition, Between the Sea and the Sky, on view through September 21 at the Fotomusem aan het Vrijthof, is composed of striking analogue portraits of twenty Dutch communities, wearing their traditional folk costumes. Reminiscent of the work of 17th century Dutch painters, the photographs are richly detailed and exuberant. Nelson has previously photographed indigenous cultures such as the Huli community in New Guinea and the Mursi community in Ethiopia, aiming to document their cultures and reawaken cultural practices using pieces that are iconographic, posed, and romantic in appearance.
However, by seemingly accepting the myth that all indigenous people’s cultures are dying, Nelson has been critiqued as misrepresenting cultures that are evolving alongside what the photographer calls the ‘developed’ world. In conversation, he implies that if he does not create these iconographic images, people external to the subject indigenous communities will not observe these cultures in a respectful way, suggesting that in Western culture we present ourselves with a similar iconographic importance in media.
In his third book, Homage to Humanity, the artist expanded on his original suggestion that indigenous culture is dwindling, saying that he “wanted to give more of a voice to the subjects — their dreams and their opinions and their worldview.” However, this does not obscure the outlying question: Shouldn’t people within indigenous cultures have autonomy to dictate their own representation in Western-made art?
We got the chance to gain insight into the photographer’s journey, methods, and attitudes to his work and subjects looking towards the future of technology and his photographic career.
What first drew you to photography as a way of capturing the world, compared to other art forms?
What drew me first to photography is, in actual fact, the other way around; photography found me.
When did you first try it out?
I was a very creative child, although the first time I picked up a camera was by accident. It was given to me by my father when I was sixteen. I’m now fifty-seven years old. It was an old Zenit B Russian analogue 35mm camera. I was planning to run away, and before I did it, my father, in all his wisdom and vice, told me: take this with you, you never know where you may end up or who you may end up seeing. Little did I know, after three years of having run away to Tibet (I left in 1984 and came back in 1986), I’d come back with my very first pictures, which were published. That was the beginning of the journey.
Has your relationship to the medium changed at all as your work has developed?
It has only become richer and richer with time. What I mean to say is: I now perceive myself to be an artist and photography the purest, richest, most invested form of photography that there is today, analogue ten-by-eight is my passion and my ongoing journey.
Global connectedness is a recurring theme threaded through much of your work. Having travelled extensively to capture communities around the world, could you share a moment in your career that made this sense of global unity feel real to you?
Bee, you are right in asking that in time, my journey has become about global connectedness. I think, referring to my response earlier, this idea of running away into the world was to redefine and rediscover myself through the human embrace. It's taken me the better part of forty years to understand that this doggedness, determination with a camera, to eventually evolve into an artist, to finally understand what I was looking for: this embrace from a community, and whether it's a community in the far reaches and the most isolated places in the world, or it's here on my own doorstep in the Netherlands; it's about the human embrace, whereby we as human beings see each other with respect, embrace and define and love.
Your portraits often feature Indigenous individuals or communities and feel carefully composed and almost ceremonial, but behind each is a real community and lived relationship. How do you ensure you respect and connect with the people who you photograph? What does ethical collaboration between artist and subject look like for you in practice?
It's a very good question to observe that all the images are defined. All the images are brutally, carefully, passionately, ultimately, lovingly composed, but it's a mutual composition. It's a mutual respect. It's a mutual dance. It's a mutual underlined in capitals, embrace of one another.
Never is a picture now made, and hasn't been for many years, without total and a hundred per cent consent of the other to manifest this consent without a mutual language, there's a deep, deep, deep mutual investment in communication, a deep mutual investment in respect for one another. This I can define and reiterate, on returning to the subjects with the pictures, because in the moment of that mutual respect and connectedness and ceremonial composition of a picture, the subjects are unaware, truly they feel what I'm doing, but unaware, truly of seeing it, until I return with the analogue, processed, and eventually developed pictures. The irony is in that return, the subjects who I now communicate with a translator, not at the beginning, will often observe that they're not particularly interested in the image. What they are interested in is my return; that mutual respect that I promised to deliver; to walk the talk and one day bring the pictures back.
The pictures will remain subjective, and they are, unlike us in the developed world, very less, far less busy than looking at themselves, let alone recording themselves. But they are very busy with respect and people holding on to their word. And that is the return. The ethical collaboration is very much part of this question. Without that mutual consent; without that mutual participation to make these ceremonial, overly romantic, composed images, there wouldn't be a collaboration in the first place. And then the long-term goal is with the Jimmy Nelson Foundation to make it reciprocal, that whilst I've taken the picture delicately, carefully, respectfully, monetised it in exhibitions and books, so as I sustain my creative studio, that there is a material return to the communities that have been photographed from my foundation. And in that return, there's a reinvestment and a learning and a guidance to enable the communities to consolidate and celebrate their culture before its passing; before it disappears altogether.
Never is a picture now made, and hasn't been for many years, without total and a hundred per cent consent of the other to manifest this consent without a mutual language, there's a deep, deep, deep mutual investment in communication, a deep mutual investment in respect for one another. This I can define and reiterate, on returning to the subjects with the pictures, because in the moment of that mutual respect and connectedness and ceremonial composition of a picture, the subjects are unaware, truly they feel what I'm doing, but unaware, truly of seeing it, until I return with the analogue, processed, and eventually developed pictures. The irony is in that return, the subjects who I now communicate with a translator, not at the beginning, will often observe that they're not particularly interested in the image. What they are interested in is my return; that mutual respect that I promised to deliver; to walk the talk and one day bring the pictures back.
The pictures will remain subjective, and they are, unlike us in the developed world, very less, far less busy than looking at themselves, let alone recording themselves. But they are very busy with respect and people holding on to their word. And that is the return. The ethical collaboration is very much part of this question. Without that mutual consent; without that mutual participation to make these ceremonial, overly romantic, composed images, there wouldn't be a collaboration in the first place. And then the long-term goal is with the Jimmy Nelson Foundation to make it reciprocal, that whilst I've taken the picture delicately, carefully, respectfully, monetised it in exhibitions and books, so as I sustain my creative studio, that there is a material return to the communities that have been photographed from my foundation. And in that return, there's a reinvestment and a learning and a guidance to enable the communities to consolidate and celebrate their culture before its passing; before it disappears altogether.
I have enquired about moments of connection on your travels, but did any specific experiences surprise you? Were there moments that disrupted your prior beliefs or stayed with you in an unexpected way?
I think the ultimate overriding answer this question is the unending, continual, surprising realisation that ninety nine point nine nine nine, I don't know how many nines percent of humanity, globally, that's more than eight and a half billion of us, have a positive, sincere, dignified, good intention in the communication and the meeting of the other. But prior to that, there has to be a very dignified, quiet, humble, often vulnerable meeting before the handshaking metaphorically takes place. And wherever I go, whatever I do, whoever I meet, whether it's here in the Netherlands on a train or it's in the middle of the wilds of Papua New Guinea, the mutual wish for positive loving connection is always there. That's what continually surprises me, whichever corner I go down, whichever dark alley I end up being stuck in at the end of the day, with that fragility and vulnerability and respect, there's the intent of the positive loving meeting of the other.
Some critics have questioned whether your photographic work romanticises or suspends cultures in a kind of timeless depiction. How would you respond to this view; do you see romanticisation or theatrics in art as something contradictory to true depiction of your subjects?
The images I make with mutual consent are positive, aspiring to be iconographic, a legacy of respect and indulgently beautiful. If I don't create this subjective, artistic narrative, I genuinely believe by far the majority of us in the developed world will not look at these humans, these peoples, in these cultures, in a respectful way. Ever since the first images were made with a camera, more than two hundred years ago, invariably, the narrative to the other was always demeaning and disrespectful and undignified. All I have done, unintentionally at the beginning, has invert that narrative and aspired to create a perception that we perceive of ourselves here in the developed world, if we put ourselves on a pedestal with beauty, with light, with respect, with all the attention and time and detail that we impose on ourselves when we are aspiring to see ourselves as human beings, we never comment on that, we never criticise that. We never say it as overly or romanticise. It is the aspiring vision for us as human beings. Whether it is true or not, doesn't matter. It's our aspiration. All I am doing is shining the light on the other, inverting the mirror on some of the wealthiest, healthiest, happiest, richest human beings on the planet. Now they may not have a bank account and the latest iPhone, but they do have something else that's intrinsically human and extremely important to see and respect. And until that's presented in a dignified, iconic, beautiful light. We won't take it seriously, and then it'll be gone forever.
Between the Sea and the Sky is said to encourage reflection on the importance of “cultural preservation and… unity in our rapidly changing world.” In a future where photos are becoming increasingly manipulated or AI-generated, what do you think is the role of photography depicting lesser-known cultures?
The whole world is busy with it. Now, I used to say, up until about two years ago, there were six out of eight and a half billion human beings on the planet who were photographers; very, very good photographers, because they were all running around with a smartphone. Now, next to those six billion, and soon to be eight and a half billion or nine billion photographers, we now have the new creator, AI. I think if you take it further and then beyond the making of a picture, technology in all its wildest and almost unimaginable forms and skills is extraordinary. It's how we're going to use it: if we lean into it and we abandon our humanity and the fragility, the how, it's also the humility, the humbleness of who we are as human beings and lean unanimously wholly into the world of technology-slash-AI, we will lose all our humanity together.
What do you hope for?
What I hope is that if you use a metaphor of two legs on a human being, that one leg is firmly and deeply rooted, imagine a tree with roots that's aged in the essence of what it is to be a human in all its fragility, but also deep rooted strength and the other leg can spin wildly and ambitiously into the future and use technology for all the extraordinary aspects that that it can bring. But both have to be used together in balance and with respect. If we abandon the deeply rooted leg, metaphorically the roots of a tree, and apply both the legs into the wild, unabated future of technology, I don't believe that there's any hope for humanity. So as I deeply lean into again, using the metaphor of the root of the tree, I deeply lean into the analogue artistry of photography, a skill that was essentially invented two hundred years ago, to feel, to impose, to live, to dream, to smell, to touch, to aspire, to make the most beautiful pictures of human beings that have ever existed, but from a human, connected perspective. And to have witness of that in the negative of the image the ten by eight large format, almost a four scale negative to validate that a human being saw, lived, witnessed and touched these subjects, and he, as in Jimmy Nelson, as an artist, it was his perspective to counter the obvious observation of AI and unendingly manipulated, let alone totally generated imagery to show a truth and authenticity into our origins as human beings, both next to each other, are valid. But if I and others abandon this authenticity of craft and let AI generate it, we will lose our human origins altogether.
In Between the Sea and the Sky you used an analogue camera designed with Gibellini: the GP810Ti. How did working with a slower medium, with potential new struggles, affect the process of your photography, and the final outcomes?
The ten by eight Gibellini camera is a sort of modern light titanium version of the first Daguerreotypes that were made more than two hundred years ago. But the whole fact that it's slower, and that it's a struggle, and that it totally affects the process is the final outcome. I'm looking for the journey, the complications, the insecurities, the scarcity of the moment where you dare expose one of these images, let alone the fact that you can almost not see the image you're making when you're in the field, far away from any form of ease. The fact that you have to wait, sometimes months until the image is processed to see the result means that in that moment, you're deep, deep, deep, deep, totally and utterly fragile and metaphorically naked.
In that process, the subject feels your investment, feels your struggle, feels your pain, feels your fear, but ultimately, and most importantly, feels your ambition, of the aspiration of the image that you're trying to make the whole art of the connection. This is the language of love, the language of respect, the language of time, patience, ultimate, obsessive, fastidious observation of the other. Now, no image will ever be perfect. The final outcome will be never as beautiful as you aspire to be. But the journey, the investment thereof prior to that that becomes the definition of the images. It's imperative to make it as complicated and as scarce and as slow and as vulnerable as possible, to make the connection with the subject. Then at the end of the day, if you have a fraction of the aesthetic of what you were looking to record, you can validate that by the negative. It wasn't made by technology. It wasn't made by AI. It was made by me in the struggle of the moment.
In that process, the subject feels your investment, feels your struggle, feels your pain, feels your fear, but ultimately, and most importantly, feels your ambition, of the aspiration of the image that you're trying to make the whole art of the connection. This is the language of love, the language of respect, the language of time, patience, ultimate, obsessive, fastidious observation of the other. Now, no image will ever be perfect. The final outcome will be never as beautiful as you aspire to be. But the journey, the investment thereof prior to that that becomes the definition of the images. It's imperative to make it as complicated and as scarce and as slow and as vulnerable as possible, to make the connection with the subject. Then at the end of the day, if you have a fraction of the aesthetic of what you were looking to record, you can validate that by the negative. It wasn't made by technology. It wasn't made by AI. It was made by me in the struggle of the moment.
In Homage to Humanity, you utilised augmented reality technology by letting viewers enter your images. Are you still interested in the digital development of photography as a hybrid medium, or do you see it as in tension with analogue practice?
A good question. I don't see it as a tension. I see it as a participant. All new forms of technology should be embraced. If you imagine, when the first analogue daguerreotype pictures were being invented and manifested. The world of fine art painting entered an insecure phase, and then that re-established a balance, and fine art painting sort of took its own podium. Then along arrived film, and then that meant the insecurities of photographers. Then that really readdressed a balance. And then there was video, and that upset film, and then there was digital, and that upset video, and then there was AI, and that upset digital. Each time there's a new medium, there's a moment of insecurity. And if one holds oneself in one's medium and the authenticity and the origins of it in the storm, you come out of the other side in calmer, clear water, as an established entity in mediums next to each other. One plus one plus one makes ten. It's not one plus one equals minus six.
Lots of the Dutch attire you depict in Between the Sea and the Sky may be unfamiliar to younger generations in The Netherlands. Were you trying to archive what is diminishing, or to reawaken cultural practices? How do you hope younger generations will engage with Dutch traditions?
I would say, within the chapters of Between the Sea and the Sky, ten is Dutch attire, which is worn regularly today by anything up to hundreds, even in one community, more than a thousand. The other ten of the chapters was more of a deep dive into the archive of diminishing cultures, as you put clearly, to reawaken cultural practices for the future. I tried to combine both and to make it into one narrative, to show the rich diversity of cultural heritage within one very, very small, flat, aspiringly progressive, modern country. It's the tip of the iceberg as to how the majority of the Dutch wear what they wear. But hopefully it's a cultural awareness, reawakening to one's heritage, to one's past.
I am obsessed with the fact that as time progresses at breakneck speed; it seems at the moment we human beings are losing that authenticity, and we lean at breakneck speed into homogeneity. This idea that not only will we all intermarry and interbreed, but we will leave any form of authenticity, any form of individuality, any form of our ancestral past. I'm not encouraging the rest of the Netherlands to run around in traditional clothing, but I am encouraging them to celebrate, to understand, to learn, to admire, to acknowledge the authenticity of the culture and the people that they come from and better understand their cultural stories, and on occasions, for the sake of ceremony, celebrate that ancestry, celebrate that past, and only then can we as individual artists, aspiring not to become this homogeneous mass, celebrate the individuality of human beings and embrace what is possible to be as a human being. It's extremely important.
I am obsessed with the fact that as time progresses at breakneck speed; it seems at the moment we human beings are losing that authenticity, and we lean at breakneck speed into homogeneity. This idea that not only will we all intermarry and interbreed, but we will leave any form of authenticity, any form of individuality, any form of our ancestral past. I'm not encouraging the rest of the Netherlands to run around in traditional clothing, but I am encouraging them to celebrate, to understand, to learn, to admire, to acknowledge the authenticity of the culture and the people that they come from and better understand their cultural stories, and on occasions, for the sake of ceremony, celebrate that ancestry, celebrate that past, and only then can we as individual artists, aspiring not to become this homogeneous mass, celebrate the individuality of human beings and embrace what is possible to be as a human being. It's extremely important.
In your essay for Between the Sea and the Sky you speak of the Dutch light almost as if it’s a lover, or a subject itself. What did this light let you see that other places don’t? Why does it seem to capture the attention of both painters and photographers?
A great question. It's not necessarily about the Dutch light, although the Dutch light is not as intense, thorough, as hot and as shining as other nations light. It's more a search for the lightness of being, if that's the best way of putting it, as opposed to the darkness of being. I think all of us as human beings, are in this sort of counterbalance, this sort of tipping point, this sort of seesaw of dark and light, dark and light, if you imagine the story of the Dutch famous painter Vincent van Gogh, having lent into the dark, he eventually, or perhaps even at the end of his life, although there's an element of the hypocrisy, leant into the light and moved to the south of France, to Provence. I travel around the world looking for the light, the lightness and place, the lightness in life, the lightness of being. It's much more of a spiritual journey and quest for the light ultimately. Then when one is searching for the lightness of being and the lightness in life, the lightness of possibility, the light can be discovered everywhere, and whether that's in the sun-drenched sands of the Sahara, or the more than often, cloudy, damp, stormy skies of the Netherlands. You can find the light everywhere. It's but it's the light that one is looking for: the lightness of life. Then there's a possibility everywhere.
You have said that your latest project made you feel belonging amongst people you could perhaps call your own, presenting the Netherlands as a type of adopted homeland. If you could hang only one photo from Between the Sea and the Sky in your home, which would it be, and why?
The project has made me feel at home, but it's not necessarily the Netherlands. I'm at home in the world, and I'm at home in myself. And if you take the metaphor even further, I now dare to look in the mirror and who I see I embrace and I love as an individual. I think prior to that moment, that feeling, there was an escape. There was the running away from the mirroring of self, and I ran into the world to look at the exotic and hope that the exotic would see me. Then I ran into my adopted country, looking for the embrace and hopefully that it would see me, and eventually the realisation that humanity can see each other, but it begins with humanity loving themselves first before they see each other. So, I now comfortably, metaphorically, look in a mirror and embrace the person that I see as a result of that. I can go to the Netherlands, or I can go to the far flung, remotest regions in the world and receive the same embrace.
At the moment, I'm busy doing a project on a community who suffered here in the Netherlands twenty-five years ago to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary of a tragedy. It was a phenomenal tragedy where a café; a disco set on fire, and more than fifteen teenagers died, and more than two hundred were burnt. For the last twenty-five years, this community has not wanted to discuss the pain that was suffered 25 years later, to celebrate the wealth of humanity they've discovered within the community here in the Netherlands and within one another. And with many of them not having a face in a traditional form of words because they lost theirs through burning have asked me, as an artist, they've given me a hand to come into their community and asked me to see them, to celebrate them with pride, with dignity, with beauty, because they have a story to tell the world. So, these are the pictures to come. This is what I've perhaps always been looking for this embrace from the other, this embrace within the community, far away or close to home, this embrace from somebody saying, I see you. I trust you as an individual, Jimmy, it doesn't matter how you look, what colour you are, what age you are, where you come from, how you sound, whether you're male or female, with or without hair. We see you as Jimmy, and we see you as an artist, and we trust you to come on a journey with us, to hold and to cherish and celebratory respectfully tell our story to the world. We also have a face. We also have a dignity. We also have an extraordinary beauty. It may not be seen on the exterior externally, because of our severe burns, but we feel it within, and we trust you, Jimmy, to be able to show it to the other so it's not the pictures I've made. It's always the pictures to come. It's always the pictures to come.
At the moment, I'm busy doing a project on a community who suffered here in the Netherlands twenty-five years ago to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary of a tragedy. It was a phenomenal tragedy where a café; a disco set on fire, and more than fifteen teenagers died, and more than two hundred were burnt. For the last twenty-five years, this community has not wanted to discuss the pain that was suffered 25 years later, to celebrate the wealth of humanity they've discovered within the community here in the Netherlands and within one another. And with many of them not having a face in a traditional form of words because they lost theirs through burning have asked me, as an artist, they've given me a hand to come into their community and asked me to see them, to celebrate them with pride, with dignity, with beauty, because they have a story to tell the world. So, these are the pictures to come. This is what I've perhaps always been looking for this embrace from the other, this embrace within the community, far away or close to home, this embrace from somebody saying, I see you. I trust you as an individual, Jimmy, it doesn't matter how you look, what colour you are, what age you are, where you come from, how you sound, whether you're male or female, with or without hair. We see you as Jimmy, and we see you as an artist, and we trust you to come on a journey with us, to hold and to cherish and celebratory respectfully tell our story to the world. We also have a face. We also have a dignity. We also have an extraordinary beauty. It may not be seen on the exterior externally, because of our severe burns, but we feel it within, and we trust you, Jimmy, to be able to show it to the other so it's not the pictures I've made. It's always the pictures to come. It's always the pictures to come.
