Jimmy Nelson
In Other Worlds
Photography saved Jimmy Nelson’s life. Nelson (Sevenoaks, England, 1967), spent his childhood in Africa, South America and Asia, surrounded by pristine nature, until entering an English boarding school at the age of seven. Traumatised by the experience, at 17 he took his camera and travelled alone to Tibet, where he began his monumental project of portraying indigenous communities from all over the world.
text Angie Ramón
photography Jimmy Nelson
Jimmy Nelson’s father was a geologist who worked in different places around the world. And this meant that Jimmy, ever since he was a baby, connected with the different cultures in Africa, Asia and Latin America, acquiring a profound awareness of the common ties that bind humanity from his earliest childhood.
But that dream quickly evaporated when at the age of seven his parents took him to a Jesuit boarding school in England. A dark experience, and one that Nelson had to strive to survive every single day. “I don’t hide the abuse I suffered in the boarding school, where they robbed me of my sense of security and the confidence every child should have”, he admits.
These awful experiences gave him alopecia totalis at the age of 17, when he lost all of his hair due to extreme stress. “This condition became an external reflection of my internal turmoil. But I am grateful for those years, because they form part of the person I am today”, says Jimmy Nelson. [...]
--------
Read this article in full in IN PALMA 81. And if you like, subscribe to IN PALMA for 1 year and get the next 4 issues of the magazine delivered to your home.
