Translator: Elisabeth Buffard Reviewer: Ms Buffard's students
Good afternoon everybody.
It's fantastic to be here, the sun shining,
I've just come down from Amsterdam
where it tends to rain most of the day,
so it's a fantastic beginning.
To begin with, I'm terribly sorry, it's going to be in English.
I feel guilty standing here
but on the other hand, you're at an advantage
because it's not so much about what I have to tell you "in se",
it's perhaps more what these people in the pictures I'm going to show you are.
So please come on a journey, it's quite simple, but it's quite spectacular.
I'm going to begin with a quote, it's something very simple I wrote
or I write in a book I published one and a half years ago.
Essentially, it says: "Be inspired
by the world's last most beautiful people and places."
It's extremely simple, and that's exactly what I want to communicate to you:
be inspired! But where did my inspiration come from?
Oh, to be honest, I copied somebody:
a man -- if any of you love photography, this is somebody you have to study,
Edward Sheriff Curtis, an icon of mine,
somebody I've hero-worshipped for about 30 years.
A hundred years ago, he made 30 books -- I've only made one --
30 books of the Native American Indian.
He put them on a pedestal, he celebrated them, he screamed,
he decorated them, he photographed them, he presented them, he said:
"These people are important, these people are extraordinary,
these people are our culture and our heritage."
But a hundred years later, there's not a lot of them left.
So here we are today. I set off on a journey 5 years ago,
essentially, as I just said, copying Edward Sheriff Curtis,
and I chose 35 of the world's last indigenous cultures, tribes,
I wanted to put them on a pedestal and I wanted to share them with you.
So about one and a half years ago, I published a book,
very exciting, never done that before,
and the world being what it is today, globalized, it spread and it spread
and it seemed every magazine on the planet was publishing something about it.
And then something quite interesting happened,
something I'd never experienced before,
all these magazines and people came to me and said:
"Jimmy, who are these people?
Where are these people?
Who are you? Who do you have the right to photograph these people?"
And ultimately, people started to wave a finger and said:
"Jimmy, we don't actually think you're right!"
And it started evolving. And then for example, we had a Facebook page.
A Facebook page which was banned,
because I was accused of peddling tribal pornography.
As you can see, somebody's mockingly painted colourful bikinis on it.
That was interesting, but it was taken a stage further.
Then online communities started saying what I had created,
and had photographed, was a fantasy and that it was an obsession.
Well, fantasy it is not, and I will show you in a minute.
But obsession it is, and an obsession that is life-long.
It goes back many, many, many years to my childhood.
This is me, I was at the age of about 7.
My father worked for an international oil company.
I travelled around the world with him.
And at the age of 7, they said,
"Off you go to the UK and back to England,
you need to go and have an education."
So I travelled around the world back and forth to my school,
And I got to the age of 16, I was ill on one of my journeys going back,
and somebody accidentally gave me the wrong medicine to deal with...
-- I think I had cerebral malaria --
and then I woke up, the morning after I'd taken the medicine,
and this is the way I looked.
So this is kind of how the obsession began.
If you can imagine going to bed one morning looking one way
and waking up the next morning with a completely different face.
You become absolutely obsessed by appearance,
subsequently obsessed by judgement, by stigma, by association.
And it's a fascinating journey, a journey which I started on,
and I started on essentially using a camera,
taking that camera with me initially to Tibet,
where I walked across at the age of 17,
and eventually further and further and further afield.
Not necessarily to make pictures,
but using it as a catalyst to make that contact
to see how people looked at me and I ultimately looked at them.
Let's go back to the book. The book was made one and a half years ago,
Before They Passed Away
sort of my iconographic representation of these people to you.
But I think it is also very important to understand what icons are or were.
I mean, they originaly evolved
in this sort of painterly figures, these fantastic...
they're always put on a pedestal, they're always glorious,
they're always beautiful, they're always powerful,
they're people we aspire to be like, people we aspire to follow.
And then technology evolved.
and then the likes of photography emerged.
And we chose our politicians, our royalty,
and eventually it evolved, we ended up twittering our icons.
But all this time I was frustrated!
A whole life having lived in the Third World,
what about the icons I know, what about the people I know?
Surely they should be put on that same pedestal
we seem to be putting everybody else on.
It was an enormous frustration.
I remember as a child seeing umpteen images like this
and finding them very patronizing, very demeaning, very colonialistic.
So I set out on this journey to change that.
So here we are, a map of the world,
all the different corners I went to,
they're like tiny needles in a haystack,
tiny little bits of culture still left dotted around.
You have to look very hard to find them.
But when you do find them,
it’s extremely important that when you arrive,
you worship them, you celebrate them, you put them on a pedestal.
So as you can see here,
I had this very old... – if any of you are technically interested –
plate film camera using sheet film,
it’s very cumbersome, it never works half the time,
you end up going to Papua New Guinea for 2 months
and you have 30 plates with you
but it's through that very handicap pro test you show your personality,
you show your passion, you show you want to put them on a pedestal.
You show you want to see these people which I’m presenting here to you today.
But at their most beautiful, at their most powerful, at their most celebrate.
Look at these, they’re the Huli Wigmen, miles and miles and miles away,
with the most fantastic appearance and decoration.
They shave their heads when they leave childhood
and enter manhood and they make these celebrated wigs
and they decorate these wigs with these fantastic feathers.
Then eventually they end up in this Avatar-esque landscape.
I'm sure all of you, in one way or another,
have seen Avatar, 5 years ago.
The most lucrative film ever made about these digitalized blue characters.
disappearing back off to the jungle.
But it still exists today! It still exists today here!
Here in Papua New Guinea.
They may not be blue, they're yellow,
but they're fantastic people,
with exactly the same traditions and values
as was represented in Avatar.
You take it a stage further:
you go to a part of the world I always dreamed of going to,
far northern Siberia, this is where the Chukchi live.
The Chukchi is some of the world's last traditional-living, looking Inuits.
Absolutely beautiful people! Extraordinarily powerful people!
I told stories before about the choices and decisions they made:
these people choose to live in this environment,
they choose to live together in this fantastic isolated culture.
And they're wildly beautiful to look at.
Or Africa. Africa is a place traditionally associated with tribes,
it's evolved, it's changed, in many ways for the better,
but deep deep deep, in Southern parts of Ethiopia, on the Omo valley,
there are people like the Mursi.
They have a traditions which nobody else still have.
These ladies, they decorate themselves with their scars,
and they have this tradition of adding a plate into their lower lip.
The larger the plate becomes, the more powerful and the richer they seem
and the more celebrated a husband they get.
A fantastic culture and tradition to be honoured and looked at.
And one of my favourites of all,
I've told many stories about them in the past,
which I'm not gonna tell today, 'cause I just want you to look at them,
I just want you to celebrate them. These are the Kazakh Eagle Hunters,
in far northwestern Mongolia in the Altai mountains
and they're truly the sort of antithesis of the kind of people
I'm trying to photograph and celebrate and show to you.
They have this tradition,
when a child leaves childhood and enters manhood.
and they're encouraged to climb these cliffs, find these baby eagles,
train them, and they spend the rest of their life living with these eagles
These eagles are sometimes 30 kilos in weight.
They have 5-metre wing spans,
they hunt and they glide over these valleys in the winter months,
for the foxes and the rabbits.
Truly magnificent people and in a magnificent environment,
Truly very much my icons.
Now we go to the Himba. The Himba are fantastic,
I sort of regard them as the ballerinas of the desert.
And it was extremely exciting:
whilst I was promoting the book, I started saying,
"I would love to go back, I would actually love to go back to these people
and show them the pictures I made."
They didn't see the pictures I made,
the majority of the people were unaware of actually what photography was.
So eventually, about two months ago, I went on a journey,
quite a spectacular journey,
back to northern Namibia, right up to the borders, the edge of Angola,
I'd say, about 98% of the Himba have urbanized, have moved to the cities.
There are about 2% still left,
living in these tracks, in these fantastic vast deserts,
with materially, they have absolutely nothing.
But culturally, they have one of the richest existences
that I've ever known or managed to be able to photograph.
I was very excited to travel back,
I think I've been filmed and photographed before,
I'm not the explorer, I'm not that original,
but I think I was probably the first person who'd actually honored them,
come back to give them what I'd taken from them in the first place.
So they started arriving and they looked at me
it was a bit "shock, horror", eventually it was quite emotional
and then we started making some more pictures and filming,
and eventually I remember we sort of sitting down
and presenting them with a book, very very beautiful;
and everybody's still,
all the kids are looking over and
everybody's leaning over your shoulders
looking at themselves in the pages.
You have no idea what it is like
to show people who've never seen pictures,
let alone pictures of themselves before,
to witness themselves, to be celebrated in a book like this.
So you change from one page to the next,
and eventually, you leave the chapter of the Himbas,
you get to the Chukchis
and then they're shocked and everybody jumps back
'cause they've never seen snow before.
Then you start telling them stories about how the Chukchis live
and eventually, there's this sort of association:
we are actually quite special. We are actually quite unique.
We are to be celebrated, we are fantastic and glorious.
And then after Namibia, I went recently back to Vanuatu.
Vanuatu, as you know, was in the news unfortunately,
with the large hurricane.
but it is truly spectacular.
And we went back to the island of Tana,
and you can see it here, extraordinary place,
and we're taking the books back,
again this Avatar-esque existence, these big Banyan trees, they're like
sorts of cathedrals in the jungle where they build their houses in,
the same process, putting the book in, giving it to them, showing it to them,
answering their questions. It was all very exciting.
And if you could imagine this room and everybody's excited,
and everybody went quiet, very still
and the chief leant over with the translator.
He said: "Jimmy, there's a problem." and I went: "Oh no! I've tried so hard,
I've come all this way across other side of the world
to give you this book and the pictures back, what have I done?"
The chief says, "Yeah. The whole village is waiting for a copy of that book too!"
So I was so proud of having carried 4 books of 10 kilos
as excess hand baggage,
now I needed to take 80 books with me. So if anybody's going that way soon,
please get in touch with me
'cause some whole families are expecting a copy of the book!
Next to that, this is a story very close to home,
but it's as valid as all the other stories I've just told you.
Somebody asked me the other day: "Jimmy, it's great, you know.
you travel to all these places, you meet all these people,
what relevance do these stories have to us?"
Well I'm gonna share with you the relevance they have to us.
Sometimes it comes in the most simplistic way.
And it's all about observations, it's all about humility, and judgement.
This is my family.
I've sort of harrassed them for the last 18 years,
taking pictures, I'm now banned from photography,
(I think banned, I don't think I actually exist half the time)
it's OK, but it was beautiful when they were small,
they followed, they perhaps idolized.
But times have changed. This is my son,
I love him dearly, he's amazing,
but he is 16. And 16 means,
in my case,"you don't exist!"; so the communication's died.
And this is only a few months ago. We were away on a holiday and my wife said,
"I'm gonna have a sabatical, you do all your disappearing, finding yourself,
it's my turn to find myself,
you take the kids back home."
I said: "I'm fine, alright, I can do this!"
So we arrived back home, day 3,
zero communication, he disappeared.
I'm sort of panicking, running around the house,
my youngest daughter came up to me and said:
"Dad, should we ring mum?" I said, "No! Don't ring mum, I'm fine!
I'm in control, I'm in control!"
She said, "Well if you're in control, can I give you a tip?"
I said, "Ok, give me a tip."
She said, "Well Naroush said he wants something new in his room.
He's changed style, he said something about goth.
"I said, "What's that? " She said: "Isn't it an idea we go to Ikea?"
"Ok, what on Earth is Ikea?" We'll buy something for his room,
we can have supper with meatballs and chips
'cause your cooking is not going very well either.
And you never know..." "Good idea!" So off we went to Ikea.
Half an hour into Ikea, it's a disaster,
the hats getting lower, the music is turning on louder,
I got to him and I said: "What's wrong?" and he says:
"There's nothing in black, too much colour."
I'm going "Aaww." and I've given up, I'm sitting on the floor,
My youngest daughter came up to me and she said:
"look what I've found, dad!"
I said: "What have you found?" She said: " Do you remember,
when we were small, we used to play with you in the bathroom,
we used to stick things on your bald head
and wind them around." I said, "Oh yeah!"
" Well, look what I found!"
So she stuck this brush on my head, and before I know,
it's 3 or 4 other kids and I had 15 brushes on my head.
Not really thinking anything about it, worrying about ringing my wife,
asking for help, how to communicate with my son.
And guess who came out around the corner: my son!
Hat off, headphones off, he came up to me
with a telephone and he made a picture. Didn't think anything of it.
Three days later, I'm sitting in my study, and all of a sudden, "Dad! Dad!"
There was a panick in the house, and I was jumping up and down,
thinking the dog had been run over or something.
"Dad! I've got one and a half million likes!"
And I go, "One and a half million likes? Where, what, who?"
"I took that picture of you in Ikea and I posted it on 9gag.
Do you know 9gag?" and I'd never heard of 9gag,
that international community of humour.
"And one and a half million people have liked me!
And I've got letters from everywhere, from Vancouver to Toronto to Tahiti!
It's amazing! Can I ask you a favour, please?" and he got down on his knees
and I remember looking at him, going "Oh, yes! Contact! Contact!"
So I got down with him, "Tell me anything, I'll do anything for you!"
He said, "My mates at school, my class, they want to come
for supper tomorrow night 'cause they all want your advice
how to also get one and a half million likes!"
"Sure! Bring them! I can't cook, but everybody's welcome."
So instead of letting go and failing,
you never know how through representation
and how through photography
you can carry on making contact with each other.
And there's one last picture I'd like to leave you with:
again, it's an iconic picture, it's an extremely important picture,
it's becoming more and more important for me the more I show it,
although I didn't think so at first.
A colleague of mine said: "Jimmy, when you do a presentation,
please show that picture of the Nenet in northern Yamal in Siberia.
I said, "But it's not my favourite!"
She said: "But it's not about it being your favourite,
there's something magical and very very special about it."
I said, "What is it?" She said, "Look in his eyes!
Look deep deep deep in his eyes! There you are!
You're reflected! You're reflected in his eyes. Surely that's symbolic."
Surely you're reflected in his soul."
And I think, to complete this story, I AM these people.
I'm etched in their souls as they are etched in mine,
on this life-long journey of discovery and communication
and sharing of my icons to you.
I hope they've etched something in your soul too.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)