Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
JAMES MOLLISON: My projects are always series of images.
I think the individual images, in a way,
don't matter that much.
It's when you see the groups, the set of images, that a
pattern emerges to form a narrative.
So whether it's just seeing the different clothes that
people wear to different concerts, and their make up,
or the different bedrooms that children have around the
world, or looking at chimpanzees' faces with
lighter skin to darker skin to freckles--
you're letting people compare and therefore, I think, tell a
larger story.
I'm James Mollison.
I'm a photographer.
I live in Venice, in Italy.
I studied documentary photography.
I suppose where my heart is is the books that I do.
And then I also do commissioned and some
commercial work.
I got here because I went to Fabrica.
Fabrica is a center for creative research, funded by
Benetton, where they also have "Colors" magazine.
It was started by Oliviero Toscani.
And it's really this place that's kind of halfway between
a college and halfway between an agency.
I got there just because a good friend was there.
And my friend said, do you want to come out and visit me
for the carnival?
And I came and ended up meeting Oliviero.
And he said, you want to move to Italy?
So I moved out to Italy a couple of weeks later.
And I've been here getting on for like 10 years now.
I felt, for the first couple of years, I didn't really
create anything that was any good, until we started to work
on "Colors." And then that was a moment where we got to
travel to some interesting places and began to do some
interesting work photographically.
The first one was, I think, going to the
Lukole refugee camp.
And we went to that camp.
And we spent three weeks in the camp and, I think, made a
solid body of work.
I then would work on other issues, from the prisons issue
to old age to taking pictures.
And I think each one went in depth into these communities.
I've just started to work again on "Colors" with Patrick
Waterhouse.
He's the art director.
And I'm a consultant creative on it.
The last issue we were in Libya, looking at how the
rebels have been customizing their cars.
What do you do when you're a rebel army that
doesn't have any tanks?
You're going up against Gaddafi.
I think we're looking at trying to do the magazine
which becomes more socially engaging again.
Getting a little bit some of the fun back into "Colors" as
well, as well as it being serious.
The projects that are most important to me, and I think
the most interesting medium as a photographer for showing
stuff is the book.
I learned quite early on that getting people to commission
you to do your ideas just doesn't happen.
So I found that the best way is just to do it yourself.
And the first project that I did was "James and Other
Apes," which is 50 portraits of the great apes--
chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans.
And that had really just come from an observation.
I'd been watching a wildlife program on primates.
And I was looking at them.
And I was thinking, god, their faces are quite
similar to our own.
And then I was thinking about how, actually, with animals in
general you tend to think of them quite generically, not as
individuals.
So I thought, I wonder if I apply this idea of the
passport photo, I wonder if you'll see them as having
different identities.
This was about Aaron, who was an 11-month-old chimpanzee.
Katie--
she had been kept in a box by a hunter for the first few
months of her life.
And she was seriously disturbed.
The project took me about three years, although probably
only five or six weeks actually taking pictures.
It was getting the permission that was very difficult.
Because I didn't want to use long lenses.
I wanted to be in with the animals.
I wanted there to be an intimacy within the portraits.
And then some of the gorillas had been
re-released into the wild.
So I had to trek in Congo to find them.
All of the apes I photographed, except for two
of them, had their parents butchered in front of them for
the bushmeat trade or for the live pet trade.
So there's this second reading which is about that plight.
Well I think as a photographer, you're always
working on quite a few things at the same time.
The next thing that came out in terms of the book was "The
Disciples," which in a way was the natural progression to the
ape project.
I think with the apes, I'd been kind of interested in
looking at individuals within groups of animals.
Whereas, with "The Disciples," I wanted to look at how
individuals formed groups to create an identity.
It's 58 montaged pictures taken outside concerts mainly
in the UK and America.
And I tried to cover all genres and give a real sense
of the different people that listen to music.
This is probably my favorite image, which is Rod Stewart.
And in a way, it was more interesting than bands like
Marilyn Manson, where in a way you'd kind of expect it.
But with Rod Stewart, it was less obvious as a subject.
The projects that I do tend to be these typological projects,
which have quite a rigorous way of working, where I set
out a set of rules.
And then I'll follow those.
So "Where Children Sleep" is 56 portraits of children, and
then their bedrooms.
You know, we were all supposed to be born equal.
But that clearly isn't true.
So I thought, if I photographed the children
equally on this plain background and then their
bedrooms separately, the bedrooms will
talk about their situation.
Jazzy, who I photographed in Kentucky, she had
all of these crowns.
And her mom was saying how she'd entered a
hundred beauty pageants.
She also said that it cost about an average of $1,000 for
each pageant to enter, which meant the mom had spent
$100,000 on pageants.
Jazzy's only 4 years old.
I had made a conscious decision.
Nearly each child is chosen specifically to tell a story
about their particular circumstance.
And that's the map of the world of the places we went to
and photographed at.
I do kind of a range of stuff as a photographer.
I don't know how you can do it any other way, unless you have
a trust fund.
I do portraits for magazines, some
celebrities, people in fashion.
I've done campaigns for Nike.
So really, it's kind of whatever comes up.
And sometimes you're doing assignments which are great.
And other times you're doing assignments which you're doing
just because you need to pay the bills.
And you need to be able to fund those other
projects you are doing.
So we're going out to visit the Dadaab refugee camp in
Kenya, close the Somali border, which has been in the
news a lot.
Some white backgrounds, if we've got the space.
They're talking of a new famine.
They're calling it the worst humanitarian disaster in the
world right now, affecting Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and
northern Kenya.
When Vice asked me to do something about the news,
something that was happening, I thought, let's go and see.
Let's try and see, learn a little bit about these people.
I don't know what this is going to be like.
I've been in refugee camps before.
But I've never been to an actual famine situation.
So for me, it's going to be a completely new experience.
The UNHCR have told us that you need to have a
permit to go in.
We haven't got that.
We're just going to be seeing what happens on the ground.
-Ladies gentlemen, welcome to Nairobi.
JAMES MOLLISON: So we arrived in Nairobi on Tuesday night.
And then set off at 6:00 AM for Dadaab.
One of the most important things when you're going to
places like this, is getting a good car.
I normally actually drive myself.
But in this situation, we're going close
to the Somali border.
People have been kidnapped.
You need to have somebody who knows the local area.
We picked up Mohammad in Garissa, our translator.
Hey.
Hey, James.
Nice to meet you.
-[SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: All of our team are
Somalis born in Kenya.
So how are we going to do for Mohammads?
We've got two Mohammads.
We met you first.
So I'll call you Mo.
And I'll call you Hammad.
We've got Ibrahim, who's just generally helping out.
The drive was about an eight hour drive.
And then we made it to Dadaab at around 4 o'clock, which
gave us a chance to go out and get a little bit of a
sense of the place.
Dadaab is a refugee camp where you have Somalis who came here
in '92 That's when the camp was founded.
And now they've had a lot of people leaving Somalia to flee
from the drought, and also from the security situation.
So in the market here they have everything.
You have restaurants.
Which is the good restaurant, Mohammad?
I think the camp is interesting.
Because in some ways, it seems very rural when you see it.
It seems like this desert scrub.
But actually, when you look a bit closer at it, it's more
like a city.
You've got the downtown center park, which have barber shops.
There were camera shops, electrical shops.
And then there were kind of a market area.
Can you see anywhere where we could get a bit higher to do a
kind of landscape shot, like those water towers?
And then as you radiate out from that, you have the houses
of the refugees who have been here a longer time.
And then as you keep on going, you get to the refugees who
have been for a little bit less time.
And then once you go further and further out, it's the
really new arrivals who had much more basic, dome-like
structures.
But it goes on and on, the camp.
The next morning, the first thing we did was go to MSF who
had arranged the permit from the Kenyan government.
So how long have you been working here?
DR. EDWARD CHEGE: I've been working here for eight months.
JAMES MOLLISON: As a doctor?
DR. EDWARD CHEGE: Yes, as a doctor.
JAMES MOLLISON: Tell me a little bit about the camp.
How big is the camp?
DR. EDWARD CHEGE: As of now, UNHCR estimates to be a
370,000 inhabitants.
JAMES MOLLISON: 370,000.
How big is it supposed to grow?
What is the forecast?
DR. EDWARD CHEGE: Due to the trends that we are seeing now,
we expect that by the end of the year, we'll have more than
half a million inhabitants in this camp.
Way beyond it's capacity.
JAMES MOLLISON: Dadaab was originally built for less than
100,000 people.
And while we're here, apparently 1,000 refugees are
arriving each day, as an average.
From MSF, we were able to get this permit.
And we went first to an area where they had quite a lot of
new arrivals.
Took the white background out and photographed some of them
out on the street.
I think the white background, for me, is really that taking
them out of their location.
I think that it's this dusty, arid desert, which actually
isn't bad as a photographic backdrop.
But I think to take them out, it really
becomes just about them.
How long did it take him to walk here?
-[SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: On one level, I want my photographs to work
on an aesthetic level, where within them, they've got the
information to tell the narrative, to tell the story.
And they stand in their own right.
But it is also important to have text with them that give
you other layers of information.
So for me, it's often very important that you interview
the people, that you have those other layers of
information.
Now what I want to do now is go to their houses to see
where they live.
The shelters seem to change.
The very basic ones are these domed ones that are made with
bent branches.
You go in just to see how few possessions people had.
I did ask one of the guys what he brought.
And he said he couldn't bring anything really.
He just bought the clothes on his back and
came with his children.
-Yes.
JAMES MOLLISON: How's it going?
Where did you learn English?
At school?
What do you want to do when you grow up?
You want to go to the USA?
No.
I come from England.
And you?
Born in the refugee camp.
So are you Somalian or are you Kenyan?
Kenyan.
I was born in Kenya as well.
Yeah, good country.
Yeah, I was born in Kenya.
I lived there until I was five.
My mom was born there.
My granddad went out as a missionary in the 1930s.
My dad shot some super eight footage of us
while we were in Kenya.
I think that memory of when you're a young kid, a lot of
it, if I actually think about it, is tied up in that super
eight footage.
I can remember when I was about 3 and 1/2 walking down
the street with my mom, holding her hand and asking
her why I wasn't black and everybody
else was black around.
I've gone back a lot of times.
I've made some friends there.
So I've gone back for assignments.
And then I've gone back for holiday as well.
It's a fascinating place.
So the next day started by going back to MSF.
And MSF showed us around the hospital that they are running
at the camp.
And we saw some incredibly malnourished babies.
-[SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: James.
What's your son's name?
And when did she arrive in the camp?
- [SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: And how far did she have
to walk to get here?
-[SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: I think that I felt that what I tried to do
through these portraits and these interiors is give a
sense of this camp.
So to give a sense of people who've been here for 20 years,
some who've been here a shorter time, and some people
just a month or a few days--
I think that within that story, this mother with her
baby that is close to death is an
important part of the story.
It's what's happening here.
And it felt right.
And it felt as though it was needed within the series.
And why did she leave?
-[SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: When did the last rain come?
-[SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: And that was pretty tough, really.
I didn't really feel as though it's the moment to
try to take a picture.
But I think it was important.
And the mom wanted it.
And then the mother also, I think, seeing the Polaroid,
she was happy about that.
I'm always slightly uncomfortable about these
situations, because I think that there can be this very
negative view of Africa.
Often it's the image that we see.
We see the famines.
We see the wars.
We see the bad things that are happening.
I think there's this paradox between, on the one level,
promoting this idea that journalists do of Africa in a
place of need.
And charities do it, of course, as well.
I'm being part of that.
But then there's this other thing where actually, Africa
isn't reported on enough.
But I do think it's important to show different things that
are happening.
Because I think I see it more as like you're throwing into
the debate.
So after that, we went towards the market area to try and
meet some of the refugees who've been for a longer time.
And we parked the car and began to look around.
And there was this gate with the Kenyan flag.
And It was the compound of this guy called Insa, who's a
21-year-old.
It was this brightly colored toilet block which had been
painted in the corner.
And then we went through.
There was a house.
And he'd painted various things on the side with "I
love you" and hearts and flowers.
And it turned out, he was getting married the next day.
Tell me a little bit about the "I love you" house.
-[SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: What's her name?
Her name is Famii.
-[SPEAKING SOMALI]
JAMES MOLLISON: He'd come to the camp when he was just two
or three years old.
And he's going to be getting married to a girl, also from
the camp, the next day.
So thank her very much.
Thank you.
For me, that is one of the most amazing things about
being a photographer.
I, perhaps, wouldn't have gone there on my own.
But to be asked to go there, it gives you a reason.
I always feel incredibly privileged to be able to go
into a situation like that.
But you know, I'm allowed to leave it.
I've got that passport.
I can fly back to Europe.
Perfect.
We can call it a day.
Photography is this key into experiencing the world.
[MUSIC - AAR MAANTA, "DHADHAMI"]