Latest news with #TheFace
Perth Now
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Chappell Roan will 'quit' music if she cannot stand up for 'villain' reputation
Chappell Roan has warned she will "quit" music if she cannot defend herself amid her so-called "villain" reputation. The 27-year-old singer believes she and other musicians should be allowed to talk openly about setting fan boundaries without being labelled "a villain or ungrateful", and the star confessed she is in danger of becoming "agoraphobic" or "so stressed out" if she doesn't speak up. Speaking on the 'Outlaws' podcast, she said: "When I started to say 'Don't talk to me like that'... that doesn't mean I'm a villain or I'm ungrateful for what I have. "It's like, why is this customary? It's so... abusive. 'I thought it was really interesting reading something about how there's so much love in apologies for people like Britney [Spears] and Paris [Hilton] and how people were so evil to them and as a community we need to apologise to them. "Absolutely, but also... that behaviour is still... people are still doing it. "Do you want me to just get to the point where I become agoraphobic? Or so stressed out, or so anxious to perform? You want me to get to that point? "Because if I don't say anything, I will. "If I do not stand up for myself, I will quit because I cannot bear this. I cannot bear people touching me who I don't know. I cannot bear people following me." The 'Good Luck, Babe!' hitmaker also warned that if she is unable to "protect who I am" she will have to quit music, or she will become "so severely depressed" she ends up in hospital. Chappell said: "I cannot bear people saying I'm something I'm not. That's what's really hard online. People just assume you're the villain. "I can't do this if I'm not trying to protect who I am. "Otherwise, I will either quit or just be so severely depressed that I have to go back to the hospital." Chappell previously voiced her fears about being a celebrity in a candid interview with The Face magazine. She said: "I feel like fame is just abusive. The vibe of this - stalking, talking s*** online, [people who] won't leave you alone, yelling at you in public – is the vibe of an abusive ex-husband. "That's what it feels like. I didn't know it would feel this bad."
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
UK-wide initiative launched to tackle marginalisation of working-class writers
Writing and publishing in the UK is in crisis, with a growing marginalisation of working-class people whose stories and experiences are not being heard, the backers of a new literary magazine and platform have argued. The Early May bank holiday has been chosen for the launch of The Bee, a UK-wide initiative that will include a website, literary magazine, podcast and outreach programme. Supported by the actor Michael Sheen and led by the Newcastle-based charity New Writing North, The Bee is a response to what they see as the 'class crisis in the UK writing industries'. The magazine will be edited by Richard Benson, who edited The Face in the 1990s. He said it was well known the creative industries were 'massively skewed' in terms of representation, but writing and publishing were 'even more skewed'. 'It is not in a good place,' he said. 'Why do we accept that it's normal to have good working-class representation in music, but you wouldn't have that in publishing? There's no real reason why that should be the case. 'All the indicators point to it getting worse. If you think back to the 60s and 70s, there was more working-class representation and people were getting their voices heard. You were seeing that showing up in the kind of books, films, television that was made.' Backers of The Bee say that 'the marginalisation of working-class writers' is increasing. They say that in 2014, 43% of people in publishing came from middle-class backgrounds and only 12% from working class. In 2019 the number of people who came from the middle class had risen to 60%. Benson said there were issues of justice and fairness, but also common sense. 'Much of the important writing being done today and so many of the best-loved stories come from ordinary working people,' he said. 'So often it's stories from the working classes that express what is really happening in the world.' One strand of the initiative will be a podcast that will try to create 'an alternative canon of classics', with guest writers and academics discussing whether a book deserves a place on the virtual shelves of 'the working-class library'. Three are being released on Monday, with Louise Doughty discussing Giving up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel; Craig McLean discussing Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting; and Simon James, a professor of English literature at Durham University, discussing George Gissing's 1891 novel New Grub Street. Benson accepted that class has always been hard to define precisely and can mean different things to different people. But he said: 'What is clear is that in 2025 your background can still affect your life chances and career prospects.' Claire Malcolm, the chief executive of New Writing North, said there had been success stories from a number of initiatives on the problem, but research showed 'the class crisis continues to grow'. She said that, according to Sutton Trust research, just 10% of authors and writers are from working-class backgrounds and 44% of newspaper columnists attended a private school. 'There's been so much debate about class in the creative industries but nothing has changed,' she said. 'Things are actually getting worse and inequality more entrenched, hence the need to make our own reality.' Malcolm added: 'Talent is classless. Opportunity, however, is class-bound. The Bee is an urgent response to that.' The first print magazine will be published in the autumn and will feature writing on contemporary life and culture by working-class writers. The Beehive, an online space providing support, community and development opportunities for new and emerging working-class writers, will launch in the summer. The Bee is an extension of A Writing Chance, a scheme for working-class writers founded by Michael Sheen, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Northumbria University. It is supported by the publisher Faber.
Telegraph
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How David Beckham became a style icon for British men
The soy sauce was his idea. The photoshoot had paused for lunch when David Beckham, wearing a denim jacket with cutoff sleeves and eating Chinese food from the carton, saw the bottle on the table. 'This looks like blood,' he said. 'We should use this.' He'd already had his hair shaved into a Mohawk – partly for the photoshoot for The Face, the style magazine I was editing (it was the first time a sportsperson had appeared on the cover) – and partly because he was tired of 'so many people with my sort of haircut', he said, referring to the blonde surfer curtains that had become his trademark and had recently appeared on some of the members of Irish boy band Westlife. It was May 2001. We were in a studio behind Old Trafford. That year, Beckham had recently led Manchester United to victory in both the Premier League and the FA Cup, and captain England. He was 26 years old. It was only Beckham's sixth photo shoot, and our young German photographer, who would go on to shoot campaigns for Louis Vuitton and Hermès, had envisaged 'footballers as warrior soldiers', having seen Saving Private Ryan on TV the night before. Beckham – chiselled, manscaped, largely pre-tattoos but with diamond crosses in each ear – cheerfully obliged. Then he emptied the soy sauce bottle over his head, temporarily blinding himself. Cue instant 'blood'. When this edition of The Face is published, the shot makes the entire front cover of The Sun. We are also in Heat, the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard, and on The Big Breakfast, GMTV and Radio 5 Live. I was interviewed about it and the magazine went 'viral', pre-social media. What happened here? Did Beckham intuit the opportunity to create an attention-grabbing image? Was he just mucking about or was it something more shrewd? I first encountered him the previous year, when he turned up to a gala fashion party with new wife, Spice Girl Victoria Adams, in matching head-to-toe leather. It is considered polite to go 'full look' when invited to a designer's event – except this was a Versace party, and Posh and Becks wore Gucci. 'It still haunts me,' Victoria said in an interview in 2022. This weekend sees Goldenballs mark his 50th birthday. Twenty-four years on from that magazine encounter, he still has the power to stop traffic, and now generate traffic, with an arresting image. See his recent shoot for Boss in tighty-whities, something that prompted lust and lamentation in equal parts: the latter, that any midlife male could have such a conspicuous absence of anything remotely approaching 'dad bod'. Why does the way David Beckham looks continue to fascinate us? How has he stayed in our gaze for so long? In the beginning, it was a heady combination of talent, fame and hotness. The preternaturally gifted lad from Leytonstone, a poet with his right foot, the England captain who looked like a Botticelli statue with his kit off. The beautiful man who played the beautiful game. He always wanted to be famous, and he said so. He loved the razzmatazz of fashion, and he said so. He was the first footballer who understood that 'season' could mean something else. 'Footballers have always had that label of drinking and being macho, and I think it's definitely changing,' Becks said in Salford that day back on the photo shoot. 'I think you've always got to have something outside of your job. Shoots like this I enjoy, it's an honour. Even though I'm all soy sauce.' 'Is it because change is in the air?' our writer Sylvia Patterson wondered. 'It's a big, gay modern world out there, and you want to represent it?' 'It's just the way I am,' Becks replied. 'It's the way I was brought up. I'm not being false. Deep down, I don't give a monkey's.' He gave a recent example. 'Before the Finland game, we were staying in a hotel and I got a phone call from the press person in London saying, 'Have you just had a manicure?' And I said, 'Well, yeah,' and she said, 'Well, one of the papers has got hold of it.'' (The writer Mark Simpson, who coined the word 'metrosexual', cited Beckham as 'the biggest example' of the trend in Britain. 'Because he loved being looked at, and because so many men and women love to look at him.') He'd loved clothes since forever. Aged seven, he'd gone shopping with his hairdressing mum Sandra for a pageboy outfit for a family wedding. He insisted on white socks up to his knees, velvet maroon knickerbockers, white ballet shoes, a frilly Spanish shirt and a matching maroon waistcoat. Mum told him he'd be laughed at, but he didn't care. He started wearing it around the house. And he continued not giving a monkey's. By his shoot for The Face, we'd already had The Sarong Incident, when he was photographed at the 1998 World Cup in France wearing the Gaultier number out to dinner, prompting howls of ridicule from the UK press, and the joke was that it was clearly Victoria who wore the trousers. 'The most tragic fashion crime in history,' declared, er, Piers Morgan. (It was Beckham's own. Of course it was. He'd bought it while shopping with Mel B's ex-husband Jimmy Gulzar, in Paris.) Then came the head-to-toe white outfits, the beanie hats, the man bun, the double denim, the mesh tops, the leather wrist wraps and the sharply tailored suits. Beckham swung between streetwear and Savile Row before such a high-low mix was considered plausible. He endorsed luxury labels like Armani while maintaining his working-class roots, creating a template for future generations – Cristiano Ronaldo, Jack Grealish – to lean heavily into fashion. Before Beckham, few people cared what shirt footballers wore off the pitch. 'He was truly one of the first athletes in Europe to successfully broker big-money brand deals,' says the fashion and sports journalist Daniel-Yaw Miller of the SportsVerse newsletter. 'For him to break into the fashion industry was equally impressive at a time when fashion had a distinct mistrust of football, which it saw as lowbrow and harmful to its elitist image.' It helped that he could shift product like few other men – a gift that continues to this day. 'It goes mad,' says Terry Donovan, marketing director at the frequently Beckham-endorsed menswear brand Percival. 'He throws on a linen suit or a knitted polo and traffic spikes, socials blow up, and before you know it – sold out. Doesn't matter what it is. If Becks wears it, the lads want it.' Of course, not everything worked – the now terribly un-PC 2003 cornrows inspired by a trip to South Africa jump to mind – but, crucially, he never backed down. Lately, he has evolved from a rugged heritage phase (baker boy caps, tweeds, Barbour jackets) into something that may be described as Modern British Male: military coats, soft tees, smart-casual wear. 'He's quite happy to show himself on his Instagram with his chickens in his garden,' says the fashion editor and consultant Catherine Hayward. 'And he's got terrible beige dad socks on with an orange beanie. Then he'll wear a really nice navy coat when he goes out in the evening with his family. Or he's on stage, and he's wearing a double-breasted light brown peak lapel suit. He's just very confident in what he does. And that comes with age. It's not edgy fashion, like Harry Styles. He's done that, and he was the first one to do it.' Indeed, he recently said he'd leave 'being daring' to his kids. 'My aesthetic is really kind of classic now,' he said last month. 'It's very understated.' It's tempting to imagine the Mohawk and the soy sauce might be taken up by Brooklyn or Romeo. Except that you know that they won't. There's only one David Beckham.
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The photographer who took on America's gun nuts: ‘I'd get death threats in the night'
'I was lucky,' says the photographer Zed Nelson, 'until I went to Afghanistan.' The 57-year-old, who has just won the Sony World Photographer of the Year award for The Anthropocene Illusion, his masterful 2024 series about our relationship to the natural world, is making us tea in his north London kitchen and talking about his early years as a documentary photographer. 'I was very drawn towards… I don't want to say 'extreme situations', but they were highly political – life or death. Often there was a kind of geopolitical storyline behind it, like the Cold War and how countries are used as proxies.' Nelson began his career as a freelance photographer in 1990, working for the Independent, the Observer, Arena and The Face (as well as, later, The Telegraph Magazine). His work often took him into situations fraught with danger, where 'there's no police, no regular army, just warring factions… When you're younger, you have more idealism, you have more naïveté. You also have more ego, and a sense that nothing bad can happen to you.' He shot stories in Cambodia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Africa and other flash-points and war zones. He recalls how his front-page images of famine in Somalia in 1992 for the Independent brought television reporters to the region; how The Face featured his photograph of a boy soldier in Angola wearing a colourful football shirt and holding a wad of cash. On the other hand, Nelson contracted dengue fever in French Guiana, and malaria in Angola, where he broke two teeth when he passed out from the effects of the disease. Things came to a head in Kabul in 1994. 'It was after the Soviets had been forced out [in 1989], and it was just Mujahideen warlords fighting. I went to Afghanistan to do a story about this forgotten war that just wouldn't end. It was also about Médecins Sans Frontières, who were the last aid agency there. All the others had left. 'And then I was in a car that got ambushed. We turned a corner, and the car was machine-gunned to pieces by two groups. I had an interpreter who got shot through the neck. The bullet sort of lodged in his face, but he survived. And the journalist I was with put his hands up over his head and had his arms kind of shot out. The bones were fragmented. He had to have skin grafts and nerve grafts, have his arms rebuilt. I didn't get hit, but at that moment, when people are screaming, and there's blood everywhere, and bullets are literally puncturing the car, my feeling was, 'I want to go home now'. It's not like a Hollywood movie. It was just like, 'Please can it stop? Can I go?'' The injured journalist was the future founder of Wallpaper magazine, Tyler Brûlé, who would come up with the idea for the publication while recovering in a hospital bed. Nelson would change direction, too, taking on a project in the US, from where, he notes, many of the weapons came. 'I'd seen that the guns were [mostly] Russian Kalashnikovs or American M-16s – that was true in El Salvador, in Angola, Afghanistan. Again, it was the proxy thing. Both Russia and America wanted to control these countries. And I thought: I'm not going to photograph Africa in grainy black-and-white any more. I'll photograph America, and their massive gun industry and the results of having guns in that society – 30,000 people shot and killed every year.' (Things have only got worse: in 2023, the figure was nearly 47,000.) The series of photographs he shot became the 1999 book Gun Nation, which was featured in 24 magazines worldwide. Among its most startling images were a portrait of a couple honeymooning at a desert shooting range, and a father holding his baby with one hand and a semi-automatic pistol in the other. There were also photographs from the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, where 12 children and a teacher were killed by two students in a pre-planned massacre. 'People were reeling,' Nelson recalls, 'and everyone was like, 'pray for healing'. 'We thought we were in the safest place in America' was always the mantra. But down the road was the gun shop, and you're like, 'You don't need to pray for healing. You just need to sort that out'.' The book brought hostility to Nelson's door. After appearing on US radio stations publicising his work, he began receiving death threats at home in London. 'It'd be the middle of the night, I'd pick up the phone, and it'd be like, 'You f---ing a--hole, I'm gonna hunt you down.' It was not funny. It probably was just some t--- being an idiot, but it was enough to make me ring the police.' Since then, Nelson has worked on a string of thought-provoking long-term projects, from his 2009 book and film Love Me, about the pervasiveness of Western beauty ideals, to his 2019 film The Street – four years in the making – about the effects of gentrification on a single street in east London. Finally, The Anthropocene Illusion will bring him the stardom he deserves, though he plays it down: 'When you work on these projects for a long time, you question if it's going to work. It's very time-consuming and expensive. So it's massively gratifying to get the award, because it makes it feel worthwhile.' In this series, which he began six years ago, he turns his gift for storytelling to the way our craving for connection with nature – even as we cause its vanishing – leads to us recreating it in illusory form in zoos, theme parks and museums, as well as garden cities, national parks and wildlife reserves. Each image contains a narrative that sets the mind whirring. In Singapore, for instance, luxuriant greenery transforms the façade of a hotel, yet as Nelson points out, 'irrigating the plants breeds mosquitoes. So they have to kill all the insects. And when you do that, you kill the birds as well. So in order to have a beautiful, natural-looking city, they have to make it entirely unnatural.' One photograph of a chimpanzee sitting on a man-made rock in Shanghai Wild Animal Park, China, encapsulates the way that the fake and the real intertwine. The walls are painted with exotic scenes of a lake surrounded by plant life, which, Nelson notes, are purely for the zoo's visitors; they don't conjure a natural environment for the animal. 'Then there's the hatch, the door,' he adds. 'Which begs the thought: where does it go? 'And of course, it's not onto the plains of Africa. It opens into a barred cage where the chimpanzee sleeps.' Nelson saw the possibility of this melancholy image when he first arrived at the park, but it took the chimpanzee 'a day and a half' to return to its pose. The waiting forced a new perspective on him. 'Zoos are designed for a kind of conveyor belt of humanity. But when you disrupt that, you see the cruelty, the boredom, the confusion of the animal, and the frustration of a creature in confinement. After two days, you also start sharing some of its feelings.' Other striking images stir the imagination. In Kenya, an Out of Africa champagne-picnic experience laid out in the Maasai Mara reserve conjures a romantic vision of colonial times for high-value tourists – 'and a Maasai warrior is also paid to be in the scene, to give it this added twist of 'authenticity'. Make of it what you will, but it's all just one big fantasy.' Nelson was born in Africa himself, in Uganda, in 1967. His first name is actually Zik, after the popular 1960s Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe. He adopted 'Zed' after a picture editor mistook his suggestion that he credit him simply as 'Z Nelson'. His parents were journalists, who had left the UK in their early 20s for the east African state. 'My dad ended up editing a newspaper there, then that became a problem, because any kind of free press under Idi Amin was a problem.' (The Ugandan army general seized power in a 1971 coup and would preside over a murderous dictatorship for the next eight years.) At one point, Nelson's father was dragged away in the night. 'I've asked my mother about it. There were soldiers on the roof and coming through the front door, and my mum was screaming, 'Don't take my babies'. It was terrifying for her. God knows what my dad thought. He plays everything down.' Nelson's father was released. But the family decided to leave Uganda and return to the UK with four-year-old Zik and his elder sister. It wasn't the end of their wanderings. 'When I was eight, they decided to drive overland to India in a converted ambulance… We literally set off from our house, and it took a year to get there and back.' He would also spend a couple of years at an international school in Hong Kong, before being sent to 'the worst comprehensive in London. It wasn't like Ofsted 'must do better', it was people being stabbed and parents not being told. There were hardly any exams done by anyone. My horizon line was massively lowered by the experience, but luckily, I still had an early background of a much bigger picture of the world.' After 'a couple of lost years', Nelson went back to college to get the qualifications needed to pursue higher education, where he studied film-making and photography. He soon realised that he could push forward more quickly with the latter. He still shoots on film. 'Digital cameras are great… but everything's so easy and quick that you don't look at things properly, or sit with things long enough.' He will admit, though, that one shot he took with his iPhone in Oslo's Natural History Museum as a reference for The Anthropocene Illusion was so amazing that it forced him to extend his trip so that he could try to reproduce it on his medium-format camera. Nelson finds it 'very worrying' that AI could accelerate the vogue for retouched and modified images – not to mention wholly AI-generated photos. He thinks it may reach the point at which 'the sense of wonder and appreciation people have for photographs is eroded because no one really believes in anything. 'If you're a photographer who takes pictures for product shots or advertising or even fashion, you know AI is coming for you,' he says. His hope is that the 'real' becomes something we learn to hold on to tightly. 'There's something about photography,' he muses. 'It's the joy of seeing something and thinking, 'Wow, that existed, that happened'. And if you take those feelings away, you're left with this Orwellian society where we trust and believe in nothing.' The Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition 2025 is at Somerset House, London WC2 ( until May 5. The Anthropocene Illusion by Zed Nelson (Guest Editions, £40) will be published next month Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The photographer who took on America's gun nuts: ‘I'd get death threats in the night'
'I was lucky,' says the photographer Zed Nelson, 'until I went to Afghanistan.' The 57-year-old, who has just won the Sony World Photographer of the Year award for The Anthropocene Illusion, his masterful 2024 series about our relationship to the natural world, is making us tea in his north London kitchen and talking about his early years as a documentary photographer. 'I was very drawn towards… I don't want to say 'extreme situations', but they were highly political – life or death. Often there was a kind of geopolitical storyline behind it, like the Cold War and how countries are used as proxies.' Nelson began his career as a freelance photographer in 1990, working for the Independent, the Observer, Arena and The Face (as well as, later, The Telegraph Magazine). His work often took him into situations fraught with danger, where 'there's no police, no regular army, just warring factions… When you're younger, you have more idealism, you have more naïveté. You also have more ego, and a sense that nothing bad can happen to you.' He shot stories in Cambodia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Africa and other flash-points and war zones. He recalls how his front-page images of famine in Somalia in 1992 for the Independent brought television reporters to the region; how The Face featured his photograph of a boy soldier in Angola wearing a colourful football shirt and holding a wad of cash. On the other hand, Nelson contracted dengue fever in French Guiana, and malaria in Angola, where he broke two teeth when he passed out from the effects of the disease. Things came to a head in Kabul in 1994. 'It was after the Soviets had been forced out [in 1989], and it was just Mujahideen warlords fighting. I went to Afghanistan to do a story about this forgotten war that just wouldn't end. It was also about Médecins Sans Frontières, who were the last aid agency there. All the others had left. 'And then I was in a car that got ambushed. We turned a corner, and the car was machine-gunned to pieces by two groups. I had an interpreter who got shot through the neck. The bullet sort of lodged in his face, but he survived. And the journalist I was with put his hands up over his head and had his arms kind of shot out. The bones were fragmented. He had to have skin grafts and nerve grafts, have his arms rebuilt. I didn't get hit, but at that moment, when people are screaming, and there's blood everywhere, and bullets are literally puncturing the car, my feeling was, 'I want to go home now'. It's not like a Hollywood movie. It was just like, 'Please can it stop? Can I go?'' The injured journalist was the future founder of Wallpaper magazine, Tyler Brûlé, who would come up with the idea for the publication while recovering in a hospital bed. Nelson would change direction, too, taking on a project in the US, from where, he notes, many of the weapons came. 'I'd seen that the guns were [mostly] Russian Kalashnikovs or American M-16s – that was true in El Salvador, in Angola, Afghanistan. Again, it was the proxy thing. Both Russia and America wanted to control these countries. And I thought: I'm not going to photograph Africa in grainy black-and-white any more. I'll photograph America, and their massive gun industry and the results of having guns in that society – 30,000 people shot and killed every year.' (Things have only got worse: in 2023, the figure was nearly 47,000.) The series of photographs he shot became the 1999 book Gun Nation, which was featured in 24 magazines worldwide. Among its most startling images were a portrait of a couple honeymooning at a desert shooting range, and a father holding his baby with one hand and a semi-automatic pistol in the other. There were also photographs from the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, where 12 children and a teacher were killed by two students in a pre-planned massacre. 'People were reeling,' Nelson recalls, 'and everyone was like, 'pray for healing'. 'We thought we were in the safest place in America' was always the mantra. But down the road was the gun shop, and you're like, 'You don't need to pray for healing. You just need to sort that out'.' The book brought hostility to Nelson's door. After appearing on US radio stations publicising his work, he began receiving death threats at home in London. 'It'd be the middle of the night, I'd pick up the phone, and it'd be like, 'You f---ing a--hole, I'm gonna hunt you down.' It was not funny. It probably was just some t--- being an idiot, but it was enough to make me ring the police.' Since then, Nelson has worked on a string of thought-provoking long-term projects, from his 2009 book and film Love Me, about the pervasiveness of Western beauty ideals, to his 2019 film The Street – four years in the making – about the effects of gentrification on a single street in east London. Finally, The Anthropocene Illusion will bring him the stardom he deserves, though he plays it down: 'When you work on these projects for a long time, you question if it's going to work. It's very time-consuming and expensive. So it's massively gratifying to get the award, because it makes it feel worthwhile.' In this series, which he began six years ago, he turns his gift for storytelling to the way our craving for connection with nature – even as we cause its vanishing – leads to us recreating it in illusory form in zoos, theme parks and museums, as well as garden cities, national parks and wildlife reserves. Each image contains a narrative that sets the mind whirring. In Singapore, for instance, luxuriant greenery transforms the façade of a hotel, yet as Nelson points out, 'irrigating the plants breeds mosquitoes. So they have to kill all the insects. And when you do that, you kill the birds as well. So in order to have a beautiful, natural-looking city, they have to make it entirely unnatural.' One photograph of a chimpanzee sitting on a man-made rock in Shanghai Wild Animal Park, China, encapsulates the way that the fake and the real intertwine. The walls are painted with exotic scenes of a lake surrounded by plant life, which, Nelson notes, are purely for the zoo's visitors; they don't conjure a natural environment for the animal. 'Then there's the hatch, the door,' he adds. 'Which begs the thought: where does it go? 'And of course, it's not onto the plains of Africa. It opens into a barred cage where the chimpanzee sleeps.' Nelson saw the possibility of this melancholy image when he first arrived at the park, but it took the chimpanzee 'a day and a half' to return to its pose. The waiting forced a new perspective on him. 'Zoos are designed for a kind of conveyor belt of humanity. But when you disrupt that, you see the cruelty, the boredom, the confusion of the animal, and the frustration of a creature in confinement. After two days, you also start sharing some of its feelings.' Other striking images stir the imagination. In Kenya, an Out of Africa champagne-picnic experience laid out in the Maasai Mara reserve conjures a romantic vision of colonial times for high-value tourists – 'and a Maasai warrior is also paid to be in the scene, to give it this added twist of 'authenticity'. Make of it what you will, but it's all just one big fantasy.' Nelson was born in Africa himself, in Uganda, in 1967. His first name is actually Zik, after the popular 1960s Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe. He adopted 'Zed' after a picture editor mistook his suggestion that he credit him simply as 'Z Nelson'. His parents were journalists, who had left the UK in their early 20s for the east African state. 'My dad ended up editing a newspaper there, then that became a problem, because any kind of free press under Idi Amin was a problem.' (The Ugandan army general seized power in a 1971 coup and would preside over a murderous dictatorship for the next eight years.) At one point, Nelson's father was dragged away in the night. 'I've asked my mother about it. There were soldiers on the roof and coming through the front door, and my mum was screaming, 'Don't take my babies'. It was terrifying for her. God knows what my dad thought. He plays everything down.' Nelson's father was released. But the family decided to leave Uganda and return to the UK with four-year-old Zik and his elder sister. It wasn't the end of their wanderings. 'When I was eight, they decided to drive overland to India in a converted ambulance… We literally set off from our house, and it took a year to get there and back.' He would also spend a couple of years at an international school in Hong Kong, before being sent to 'the worst comprehensive in London. It wasn't like Ofsted 'must do better', it was people being stabbed and parents not being told. There were hardly any exams done by anyone. My horizon line was massively lowered by the experience, but luckily, I still had an early background of a much bigger picture of the world.' After 'a couple of lost years', Nelson went back to college to get the qualifications needed to pursue higher education, where he studied film-making and photography. He soon realised that he could push forward more quickly with the latter. He still shoots on film. 'Digital cameras are great… but everything's so easy and quick that you don't look at things properly, or sit with things long enough.' He will admit, though, that one shot he took with his iPhone in Oslo's Natural History Museum as a reference for The Anthropocene Illusion was so amazing that it forced him to extend his trip so that he could try to reproduce it on his medium-format camera. Nelson finds it 'very worrying' that AI could accelerate the vogue for retouched and modified images – not to mention wholly AI-generated photos. He thinks it may reach the point at which 'the sense of wonder and appreciation people have for photographs is eroded because no one really believes in anything. 'If you're a photographer who takes pictures for product shots or advertising or even fashion, you know AI is coming for you,' he says. His hope is that the 'real' becomes something we learn to hold on to tightly. 'There's something about photography,' he muses. 'It's the joy of seeing something and thinking, 'Wow, that existed, that happened'. And if you take those feelings away, you're left with this Orwellian society where we trust and believe in nothing.'
