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Jimmy Nelson’s World – The Eternal Spectre of the Noble Savage
Taco Hidde Bakker, Sophie Feyder, Annie Goodner
A Dutch version of the following essay was published under the title Jimmy Nelsons wereld in EXTRA 17 (Fall 2014), FotoMuseum Antwerp, pp. 34-41. For inquiries and/or republication, please obtain written permission from (one of) the authors: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Monumental is a term that best describes Jimmy Nelson’s photo project Before They
Pass Away, published as a book in late 2013 and traveling as an exhibition since, both
for its ambitious scale and the subsequent size of the book.1 And not least for its
monumental failures and contradictions, of which one of the most damaging, perhaps, is
that Nelson propagates cultural diversity in a totalizing and homogenizing way. His work
neatly fits into a centuries-old tradition of romanticizing non-Western purity and
authenticity.
On many trips across the world and employing all the modern technologies he implicitly
deems responsible for the decline of indigenous cultures, Nelson went 'hunting' for the
most remote peoples and places on earth, to capture in photographs 29 indigenous
tribes "before they pass away"2. The indigenous subjects depicted are wearing traditional
garments, and are according to Nelson not just at their “Sunday best” but in their “day-to-
day” attire. What Nelson tried in his carefully composed tableaus is to “invert the racism
and put them on a pedestal. Rather than making an authentic picture of them, I try to
present them in an iconic light, in the same way we do with the people we perceive as
important.”3
The craze for monuments stemmed from a desire to guarantee unambiguous origins and 1 Published by teNeues in 2013, the special (“luxurious”) XXL book measures no less than 460x630 mm 2 “Across the world” excludes the continents of Europe and North America, as in Nelson’s view its peoples and cultures are impoverished, i.e. they have lost their authenticity. 3 Nelson at a discussion about his work, organized by sub_Stance and the working group Bring Your Images, National Museum of World Cultures, Leiden, 14 April 2014.
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cultural stability, in the context of rampant nationalism and patriotism in the rapidly
changing world of the 19th century. Jimmy Nelson’s mission resonates with this modern
obsession with lasting monumentality: it seeks nothing less than to create a universal
visual archive (“for humanity”) of indigenous cultures in spectacular locations, before
modernity ultimately comes to destroy them both. In short, the message Nelson wants to
bring across is: we moderns (have) become impoverished with the demise of indigenous
cultures and we need to protect their authenticity (in order to recover our connection to
mother Earth).
Nelson (UK, 1967), who as a child lived in the (former) Third World and later attended
Jesuit boarding schools in England, started his career as a photojournalist, then, having
to support a family, ventured into commercial photography. Major financial backing by
Dutch billionaire Marcel Boekhoorn enabled Nelson to embark on a project close to his
heart. Before They Pass Away, he said, is not so much about photography, but about
finding himself and about making contact. The purpose of it consisted of a “combination
of self-indulgence and to make what I perceive of the most beautiful pictures I technically
can make of the most beautiful places and the most beautiful people on the planet.”
It is unquestionable that Jimmy Nelson has impressed many people, partly for his
persona as a relentless and passionate adventurer, but most of all for his technically
brilliant and breath-taking photographs. Amongst the flow of appraisal he received, BBC
called him a “maestro”. The work also received considerable attention in the
Netherlands, where Nelson is based, since the fall of 2013. Before They is presented in
three ways, as a book, exhibitions in a commercial setting (travelling to 17 galleries in
the culturally impoverished continents of Europe and North America), and several
museum shows. In The Netherlands, an extensive solo exhibition of Nelson’s work was
on show from April through September 2014 at the National Museum of World Cultures
in Leiden. By assigning Nelson the task to photograph the Dutch “tribes” of the islands of
Marken and Terschelling, and adding them to the exhibition of Before They, the museum
attempted to counterbalance Nelson’s one-sided aestheticism. But the show remained
too immersive and averse to serious criticism within its set-up, to spark much critique
from visitors and reviewers alike. They were stunned into silent admiration instead. The
formerly respectable daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad featured an uncritical review of
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Nelson’s project, admiring the beauty and courage of the so-called premodern people
and asking how long it would take for their hands to be contaminated by iPhones.4
The project as a whole acts as a kind of visual blitz, to such an extent that even for
potentially critical sources it works like a "stun-gun to subdue, to quiet thinking"5, causing
nothing but awe to express. Because the photographs are so spectacularly produced
(orbiting around Nelson’s role as fearless director and adventurer), we stop thinking
about, interrogating, or seeing the often-blatant inconsistencies in descriptions and
definitions of the ‘tribes’ (Tibetans, Maori and Vanuatu are all equally whole, equally
‘tribal’, equally anti-modern). Context becomes irrelevant. Time becomes irrelevant too.
Never mind that a simple Internet search will yield more than twenty photography books
from the last three decades with nearly identical missions or titles (almost always
something with 'vanishing').
4 Marianne Vermeijden, 'Vergeven en vergeten is hier een misdaad', NRC Handelsblad, 7 March 2014. 5 James Clifford in email correspondence with Taco Hidde Bakker, 30 March 2014.
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In one astounding image from Before They Pass Away, two men in Vanuatu, an island
nation in the Pacific, boldly rest atop a rocky peak, gazing into the distance. The sun
illuminates the palm trees below and casts shadows across the vibrant sea, forest, open
sky and their exposed and lean bodies. Positioned at the very center of the frame, each
man is holding a bow and arrow in contemplation. This tableau is at once intimately
close - any closer and the viewer would be flung off his perch -, and yet they are
untouchable. This image is as technically beautiful as the other images in the series, with
a balance of vibrant colour, texture, meticulous composition and superb timing.
But what happens if we look more closely at this photograph? Why are these men bow
and arrow they normally use to fish the ocean on top of a mountain? What status does
the volcano have in local mythology? And in what way does ‘Sunday best’, a term
continuously used by Nelson to describe the eye-catching traditional attire worn by most
of his subjects, transform the of subjects’ tools and clothing into an empty vessel for our
imagination and wonderment? One starts to wonder to what extent the places, things
and people appearing in this work have been neatly arranged to both excite us as
viewers and then satisfy our curiosity. Nelson readily admits to staging the scenarios he
photographs, which is apparent in the abundant ‘behind the scenes' images featured on
the project’s website.
Looking closer once more, this image is also a prime example of the key mechanisms
behind the success and popularity of Nelson’s work. As the project’s quasi-urgent title
warns, this beauty sits on a precipice: in order to exist it must be witnessed by us,
perpetually, but at a safe distance. A cornerstone of this model is the pronouncement of
imminent destruction; creating a sense of urgency that Nelson spreads over the entirety
of the work. By simply owning the book we contribute to the establishment of a
permanent visual record of an authentic mankind before modernization disrupted it (or in
Nelson’s opinion: corrupted it). Ultimately, the work assumes that the subjects don’t have
an internal method of recording or exploring their lives and the changes to their lives.
The two men in this photograph have no names, they are simply known as ‘the Vanuatu’.
While the book contains cursory information about rituals and food, the subjects’
ethnicity predominantly finds expression in the surrounding, seemingly untouched,
natural landscape.
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Since its inception, photography has been used to record and romanticize a world
seemingly threatened by change. From Charles Wooley documenting ‘the last of the
black Tasmanians’ in 1866 to Edward S. Curtis’s early twentieth-century depictions of
‘the vanishing race’ in The North American Indian (1907-1930), photography has
continued to popularise and illustrate narratives of disappearance. This kind of
photography requires a seemingly disempowered subject. Colonialism has historically
provided the circumstances for engendering this kind of relationship. However, as is
evident in the huge amount of critical discourse that has developed especially around
Curtis’s work, this (photographic) relationship is no longer acceptable. Today there are
abundant indigenous movements to protect ancestral lands, a U.N. charter on
indigenous rights, as well as a larger global dialogue about post-colonial representation.
This political dimension is crucial to the contemporary relevance of Jimmy Nelson’s
project, but has gone completely missing. Rather, Before They seems to flourish as a
result of its atemporality: the subjects are dead silent, not granted voice in a dialogue.
Admirers are offered entry into a world without time, without history and without power
dynamics. They are given the conflicting task of pre-empting an inevitable
disappearance of people whose very presence in this project is prefaced on their
threatened status.
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Before They Pass Away has become a brand and a major commercial venture,
obscuring important questions about ethical responsibility and the rights of its subjects.
Under the sign of a mutual, even primal understanding (Nelson often demonstrated how
he communicated with his subjects, by making himself small as a dog to win over their
confidence that he is harmless), the production team has not bothered to issue release
forms, which is and should among documentary photographers, ethnographers and
filmmakers be a basic act of using informed consent. Furthermore, Nelson naïvely
assumes that his interaction with his subjects, as well as bringing a copy of the heavy
book back is worthy compensation for their ‘participation’. It follows his outdated notion
that the peoples he photographed—despite many meanwhile having been photographed
by tourists for decades—neither have a clue of what a camera is, nor use for any
monetary compensation.
Here we have pointed out only some of the many inherent inconsistencies throughout
the project. Perhaps the most patronizing and worrying is the basic idea that while his
subjects have so much to teach us, they remain ignorant of their cultural assets and
Nelson, or the enlightened viewer in the urbanized centers of the world, is the person
who must make their cultural wealth apparent on a global scale.
© 2015
Taco Hidde Bakker, Sophie Feyder, Annie Goodner
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