Jimmy Nelson: Humanity

A selection of Jimmy Nelson’s most sublime photographs highlighting the beauty of Indigenous peoples around the world

The spectacular shots of the award-winning photographer discovering the beauty of humanity.

Jimmy Nelson: Humanity is about the renowned photographer Jimmy Nelson's personal and artistic journey across the world, an expedient to take people across a deeper journey of reflection on their own identity as part of the universal family of humans. His travels are similar to field expeditions, with lots of preparation and contingencies to take into account. They can last weeks, if not months. For Jimmy Nelson, traveling is part of his artistic process, epitomizing a resolute search into what it means to be human, deeply, at the core of our shared origins from one same source in the African continent. In the process, he has reconnected with his own deeper self and has realized that humanity is all one.

In Jimmy Nelson: Humanity, the photographer is passionate to share why he is obsessively searching for a form of art that can embrace what he experiences in the field, when he finds alignment with the people, nature, light; a sense of balance that creates a symphony of experiences that analogue photography, in the form of the giant 10x8 negatives, gets close to express and that allows him to funnel all the emotions that he wants to record visually, in just one instant.

Through his spectacular shots, Jimmy Nelson's journey becomes our journey and indigenous peoples, normally photographed as an ethnographic subject, become the protagonists of a story of "unadulterated beauty" that empowers the beholders to perceive all humanity.

About the Author:

Jimmy Nelson (1967) started working as a photographer in 1987. After his journey in Tibet, his unique visual diary, featuring revealing images of a previously inaccessible Tibet, was published to wide international acclaim. Soon after, he was commissioned to cover a variety of culturally newsworthy themes for many of the world leading publications ranging from the Russian involvement in Afghanistan and the ongoing strife between India and Pakistan in Kashmir to the beginning of the war in former Yugoslavia. In early 1994, he and his Dutch wife Ashkaine produced Literary Portraits of China, a 40-month project that took them to all the hidden corners of the newly opening People's Republic. His latest works, Before They Pass Away and Homage to Humanity, have established the photographer internationally.