PHOTOGRAPHER/PROJECT: Jimmy Nelson, Photographer of Indigenous Peoples,
“Before they Pass Away”

www.beforethey.com

www.jimmynelson.com

BRIEF BIO: Jimmy Nelson

Born in 1967, Jimmy Nelson was a geologist for an oil company. He lived in Africa, Asia, and South America until 7 when he was placed in an English boarding school. While there, he developed alopecia totalis (a condition where all hair falls out) and became a social outsider.

He left boarding school in 1986 and decided to trek across Tibet and find an identity among bald Tibetan monks. He brought a small camera and photographed his journey across a country that had opened to tourism only a year before. This started his “journey.”

For the following five years, he tried to be a journalist focusing on wars and violent conflicts in the Middle East and Asia. He then met his wife and settled into commercial photography to provide a safe and secure environment to raise a family.

PROJECT: Before they Pass Away

When the financial crisis hit in 2009, he decided to turn to his original passion: ethnicity. Dutch billionaire, Marcel Boekhoorn funded the project.

'Before they Pass Away' is a project based on Edward Sheriff Curtis’s photography of indigenous Native American tribes (which has been criticized for romanticizing, and falsifying his portraits ).

Nelson does not claim to be an anthropologist creating true ethnography and was not educated. He says though the photographs are arranged to gain a certain aesthetic and optimize lighting, 80 percent of the individuals are in their daily dress, and 20 in their “Sunday best.”

He photographs with a 4×5 film camera in order to gain the most detail available per negative.

So far, he has visited 35 indigenous tribes around the world in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and South Pacific.

“Whether in Papua New Guinea or in Kazakhstan, in Ethiopia or in Siberia, tribes are the last resorts of natural authenticity.”

“Most importantly, I wanted to create an ambitious aesthetic photographic document that would stand the test of time. A body of work that would be an irreplaceable ethnographic record of a fast disappearing world.”