Latest news with #ZedNelson
CNN
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘We're creating an illusion for ourselves': Photographer explores how humans have lost touch with nature
Visual artsFacebookTweetLink Follow Zed Nelson spots the painting on the wall behind me almost as soon as we begin our interview. 'It's perfect,' he said. The canvas depicts a sleeping tiger draped across a velvet cushion, floating among pastel-shade leaves and flowers. The London-based photographer doesn't mean 'perfect' as in 'masterfully painted;' he means it's the perfect metaphor for the idealized, human-centric relationship we've cultivated with nature. The painting reminds him of another artwork, 'A young Tiger Playing With Its Mother,' by the French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix, who used a captive tiger at a zoo and his pet cat as models. 'The Romantic movement in painting began with the human divorce from the natural world. As we removed ourselves from nature, and it receded from our imagination, we reenacted these hyper-romantic versions of nature,' said Nelson. It's the central thesis of his latest project, 'The Anthropocene Illusion,' which earned him Photographer of the Year at the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards. Captured across 14 countries and four continents over six years, the images show nature as imagined by humans: staged habitats in zoos, manufactured ski slopes, indoor rainforests, and artificial beaches. In his previous project, 'Love Me,' Nelson explored the homogenization of beauty standards. 'There's some echo of that here. It's about how this artificial, idealized version of nature is being — I mean, I want to say sold back to us, but we're willing participants in it, too,' Nelson explained. 'While we destroy the real thing, we seem to be creating more and more artificial or choreographed, curated versions of nature.' It's this 'psychological disconnect' that Nelson is most interested in exposing. The collection is equal parts ironic (a Maasai tribesman posing beside a picnic blanket for an 'Out of Africa' champagne brunch in Kenya) and dystopian (a child perched on a fiberglass rock at a beach in the world's largest indoor rainforest, the canvas of the sky slightly ripped behind him). 'That's very sort of Truman Show-esque. He's gone to the very edge of that artificial world,' said Nelson of the photo. More than anything, though, there's a feeling of sadness that permeates the collection: taxidermied museum dioramas of endangered species; vibrant fish shoals swimming in dark aquariums with plastic pipes, captive elephants paraded to a bathing spot for the benefit of flocks of Instagram influencers; a caged polar bear crouched beside a mural depicting an Arctic landscape it will never know. 'What we replaced real nature with becomes an unwitting monument, really, for what we've lost,' Nelson observed. The term 'Anthropocene' refers to the age of humans. It's not an official epoch — yet. But Nelson believes firmly that, in years to come, today's society will mark the beginning of this new era, evident in elevated carbon dioxide levels from fossil fuels, an abundance of microplastics, and layers of concrete. 'The usefulness of renaming an epoch, in this instance, would be to focus people's attention on our impact on the planet,' said Nelson. As he sees it, 'the language of (environmental action) has become sort of tired or stale; you become kind of immune to it.' He wanted to counter this collective numbness with visuals that 'make you think or feel differently.' Bleak but beautiful, his photos reveal a paradox. Less than 3% of the world's land remains ecologically intact, according to a 2021 study, yet nature-based tourism and biophilic architecture, a design philosophy that mimics nature, are surging in popularity. Global wildlife populations have dropped by an average of 73% in the last 50 years; meanwhile, there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild, globally. Arctic ice sheets are on course for catastrophic 'runaway melting' that would see rising sea levels devastate coastal communities. But at the same time, cocktail bars in Dubai are importing ancient glacier ice from Greenland to provide the wealthy with pollution-free drinks. 'We're engaged in creating an illusion for ourselves; either to hide what we're doing, or as something that we can retreat into for reassurance, because we crave the very thing that we've lost,' said Nelson. There's a spectrum to the illusion, ranging from managed outdoor landscapes to contrived scenes that simply evoke the idea of nature. Nelson likens it to fast food: 'We don't want to grow it and prepare it; we just want it delivered to us with no thorns, no danger, with a nice walkway in a car park. We want to consume it and then come home. We are complicit in it.' Despite his criticisms of the 'consumerist' qualities of today's manufactured natural experiences, Nelson emphasizes that he's not necessarily against any of these things: people should enjoy safaris, be awe-inspired at aquariums, relish their time in a local park, and not 'destroy ourselves with guilt.' 'We have this enduring craving for nature, for a connection to the natural world. That's real,' he observed. There's a limit to what the individual can do, too: the kind of sweeping change required to protect the environment needs to come from major corporations and political leaders, which, in Nelson's view, is sorely lacking. 'It's important to remind ourselves, it's not that we don't have ideas for things that can be done,' he said, reeling off a long list of environmental policies that could change the course of climate change. Perhaps this book, with its stark juxtaposition of astonishing wildlife and human interference, can be a reminder of just how in control of the world we are — with the power to remodel it in our own image, or protect and restore the landscapes we feel so connected to. 'When you're surrounded by something so much, it can become utterly invisible,' Nelson said. 'Photography is a way of trying to make it visible again, trying to expose it for what it actually is.' After the call ends, I can't unsee the Anthropocene illusion in my home. It's not just the anthropomorphic tiger on the wall. It's a Himalayan rock salt lamp, a plastic monstera plant and paper carnations. A cockatoo-shaped ceramic jug next to pine-scented candles and an aluminum 'lemon-wedge' bottle opener. Floral-print cushions and a jungle-themed throw. It's hard to shake Nelson's words about our collective complicity; our willingness to participate in reconstructing the natural world, instead of saving it.
CNN
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘We're creating an illusion for ourselves': Photographer explores how humans have lost touch with nature
Visual artsFacebookTweetLink Follow Zed Nelson spots the painting on the wall behind me almost as soon as we begin our interview. 'It's perfect,' he said. The canvas depicts a sleeping tiger draped across a velvet cushion, floating among pastel-shade leaves and flowers. The London-based photographer doesn't mean 'perfect' as in 'masterfully painted;' he means it's the perfect metaphor for the idealized, human-centric relationship we've cultivated with nature. The painting reminds him of another artwork, 'A young Tiger Playing With Its Mother,' by the French Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix, who used a captive tiger at a zoo and his pet cat as models. 'The Romantic movement in painting began with the human divorce from the natural world. As we removed ourselves from nature, and it receded from our imagination, we reenacted these hyper-romantic versions of nature,' said Nelson. It's the central thesis of his latest project, 'The Anthropocene Illusion,' which earned him Photographer of the Year at the 2025 Sony World Photography Awards. Captured across 14 countries and four continents over six years, the images show nature as imagined by humans: staged habitats in zoos, manufactured ski slopes, indoor rainforests, and artificial beaches. In his previous project, 'Love Me,' Nelson explored the homogenization of beauty standards. 'There's some echo of that here. It's about how this artificial, idealized version of nature is being — I mean, I want to say sold back to us, but we're willing participants in it, too,' Nelson explained. 'While we destroy the real thing, we seem to be creating more and more artificial or choreographed, curated versions of nature.' It's this 'psychological disconnect' that Nelson is most interested in exposing. The collection is equal parts ironic (a Maasai tribesman posing beside a picnic blanket for an 'Out of Africa' champagne brunch in Kenya) and dystopian (a child perched on a fiberglass rock at a beach in the world's largest indoor rainforest, the canvas of the sky slightly ripped behind him). 'That's very sort of Truman Show-esque. He's gone to the very edge of that artificial world,' said Nelson of the photo. More than anything, though, there's a feeling of sadness that permeates the collection: taxidermied museum dioramas of endangered species; vibrant fish shoals swimming in dark aquariums with plastic pipes, captive elephants paraded to a bathing spot for the benefit of flocks of Instagram influencers; a caged polar bear crouched beside a mural depicting an Arctic landscape it will never know. 'What we replaced real nature with becomes an unwitting monument, really, for what we've lost,' Nelson observed. The term 'Anthropocene' refers to the age of humans. It's not an official epoch — yet. But Nelson believes firmly that, in years to come, today's society will mark the beginning of this new era, evident in elevated carbon dioxide levels from fossil fuels, an abundance of microplastics, and layers of concrete. 'The usefulness of renaming an epoch, in this instance, would be to focus people's attention on our impact on the planet,' said Nelson. As he sees it, 'the language of (environmental action) has become sort of tired or stale; you become kind of immune to it.' He wanted to counter this collective numbness with visuals that 'make you think or feel differently.' Bleak but beautiful, his photos reveal a paradox. Less than 3% of the world's land remains ecologically intact, according to a 2021 study, yet nature-based tourism and biophilic architecture, a design philosophy that mimics nature, are surging in popularity. Global wildlife populations have dropped by an average of 73% in the last 50 years; meanwhile, there are more tigers in captivity than in the wild, globally. Arctic ice sheets are on course for catastrophic 'runaway melting' that would see rising sea levels devastate coastal communities. But at the same time, cocktail bars in Dubai are importing ancient glacier ice from Greenland to provide the wealthy with pollution-free drinks. 'We're engaged in creating an illusion for ourselves; either to hide what we're doing, or as something that we can retreat into for reassurance, because we crave the very thing that we've lost,' said Nelson. There's a spectrum to the illusion, ranging from managed outdoor landscapes to contrived scenes that simply evoke the idea of nature. Nelson likens it to fast food: 'We don't want to grow it and prepare it; we just want it delivered to us with no thorns, no danger, with a nice walkway in a car park. We want to consume it and then come home. We are complicit in it.' Despite his criticisms of the 'consumerist' qualities of today's manufactured natural experiences, Nelson emphasizes that he's not necessarily against any of these things: people should enjoy safaris, be awe-inspired at aquariums, relish their time in a local park, and not 'destroy ourselves with guilt.' 'We have this enduring craving for nature, for a connection to the natural world. That's real,' he observed. There's a limit to what the individual can do, too: the kind of sweeping change required to protect the environment needs to come from major corporations and political leaders, which, in Nelson's view, is sorely lacking. 'It's important to remind ourselves, it's not that we don't have ideas for things that can be done,' he said, reeling off a long list of environmental policies that could change the course of climate change. Perhaps this book, with its stark juxtaposition of astonishing wildlife and human interference, can be a reminder of just how in control of the world we are — with the power to remodel it in our own image, or protect and restore the landscapes we feel so connected to. 'When you're surrounded by something so much, it can become utterly invisible,' Nelson said. 'Photography is a way of trying to make it visible again, trying to expose it for what it actually is.' After the call ends, I can't unsee the Anthropocene illusion in my home. It's not just the anthropomorphic tiger on the wall. It's a Himalayan rock salt lamp, a plastic monstera plant and paper carnations. A cockatoo-shaped ceramic jug next to pine-scented candles and an aluminum 'lemon-wedge' bottle opener. Floral-print cushions and a jungle-themed throw. It's hard to shake Nelson's words about our collective complicity; our willingness to participate in reconstructing the natural world, instead of saving it.
Scoop
28-07-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Think Deeper Than Politics And Renounce Ideology
In an unsettling article entitled, 'How humans got addicted to faking the natural world,' Zed Nelson starkly states, 'Just 3% of the world's land remains ecologically intact.' But he conventionally concludes his otherwise thoughtful piece by declaring that 'It is on an industrial and political level that change needs to happen.' Politics is the outermost disorder arising from the human psyche and the globalized culture. Continuing to view the human crisis in terms of political lenses, whether the ruling capitalist, increasingly authoritarian lens, or the progressive lens, prevents change. As humankind slides toward a 'tech-obsessed fascist future,' boilerplate progressive analysis has become a theatre of the absurd, repeating nonsense such as, 'We explore alternatives rooted in queer, Indigenous, and Marxist standpoints.' Right-wing extremists easily dismiss such idealistic blather, which has no relationship to what's actually happening in the world. To make everything political is to render every field a battlefield. For example, it's a fool's errand to insist we must 'fold political analysis into scientific inquiry in a way that makes science more multifaceted and more honest.' Politics is the art of dissembling and manipulation, and must be kept out of science as much a possible. That doesn't mean we should ignore the history of eugenics, patriarchy and speciesism that has often characterized the history of science. It means that we need to look deeper than countering prevailing ideologies with philosophically and spiritually empty 'alternative' ideologies. The idea that 'science thrives when its advocates are shrewd politicians but suffers when its opponents are better at politics' is as wrongheaded as an idea can be. It is the antithesis of the way ahead, for science, for the individual, and for humanity. The wisdom of Epicurus still applies: at times like these, avoid political turmoil and value the inquiry and insight of true friendship. Philosophy, which is the pursuit of insight through inquiry, comes before science, and spirituality, which is the awakening of Mind without thought, comes before philosophy. The rightful accumulation of knowledge is not the point of either philosophy or the inner life, but of science. The intent and goal of science is to be as objective and politically neutral in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge as possible. To say, 'scientists must reckon explicitly with the ways in which the knowledge they produce, and the processes by which they produce it, are already and unavoidably political ' is to condemn humankind to the tech-obsessed fascist future that progressive ideologues purport to remedy. Any scientist worth her salt will tell you that if s/he has to 'grapple with her own political perspectives constantly' she'll be unable to do science. Grapple with political perspectives if you will, but if we cannot keep politics out of science, we will stymie scientific advancement. Of course, the reality is that the most scientifically advanced nation on Earth is turning totalitarian, and is well down the road of jackhammering the foundations of its scientific advances. However, the remedy is not to make science more political, anymore than it is to make politics more scientific. The remedy is to free ourselves of ideology, whether of the dominant right or the doctrinaire left. The philosophical assertion that knowledge is inherently and unavoidably political is the product of political deformation. It allows no space for the true remedies of the inner life, philosophy and friendship. To 'call upon scientists to put our imaginations to work differently, in ways that move us through this nightmare portal into a dreamier world, where justice is not cropped out of scientific endeavors but rather centered and celebrated,' is to continue to give erroneous primacy to science, and call for living in a dream world of illusion, ignorance and ineffectuality. We return to first things – the momentum of man's destruction of the ground on which we stand, the air we breathe and the water we drink – the momentum of the so-called Anthropocene Age. Man did not begin decimating the Earth with the Industrial Revolution, or even with the Agricultural Revolution. We are the same humans we were during the innumerable centuries of Indigenous times; we just lived under daily threat from and awareness of nature, and lacked the technology to dominate and 'conquer' the wilderness. Therefore it is most certainly not on 'the political level that change needs to happen,' but on the level of radical change and transmutation within individuals as microcosms of human consciousness as a whole. With only 3% of wilderness left on Earth, and the obscenely globalized Disneyfication of our relationship to nature, the obsession with the political dimension is small-minded. Limiting ourselves to the ludicrously limited borders of politics, and insisting that we 'must' embrace this or that ideology to avoid a future that's already here and now, is philosophically obtuse and inwardly irresponsible. We have to face and remain with what is, within and without, before we can begin to imagine, create and build a different world.
Stuff.tv
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Stuff.tv
WIN! Tickets to the Amateur Photographer Festival of Documentary Photography
Our friends at Amateur Photographer are hosting another Festival of Photography. This time around, the subject is documentary photography. Again it takes place at the Royal Geographical Society in South Kensington, London, UK. The date is 9 August 2025 – and you could win two tickets to the event worth £79. Throughout the day you will hear from a series of world class experts in Documentary photography. They'll give an insight into their work, how they captured some of the world's best known documentary images and how you can too. Confirmed speakers include: Zed Nelson, Laura Pannack, Jillian Edelstein, Jon Nicholson and more. We've got full speaker details at the bottom of this article. The event takes place at the Royal Geographical Society in London's South Kensington museum district. So whether you're an experienced photographer looking to refine your skills or a budding enthusiast eager to explore documentary photography, the day will cover a wide range of expertise and interests Amateur Photographer magazine is the UK's biggest-selling photography magazine. First published in October 1884, it holds the distinction of being the world's oldest consumer photography magazine at over 140 years old. It remains the only printed weekly photo magazine. Festival of Documentary Photography key details Dates: Saturday 9 August 2025 Location: The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London, England – SW7 2AR Ticket prices: £39.99 for full access or £14.99 for individual theatre talks. Festival of Documentary Photography key speakers ZED NELSON: Guns, Beauty and the Anthropocene This year's Sony World Photography Awards winner Zed Nelson takes us on a revealing journey into humankind's increasingly illusory relationship with the natural world, and behind the scenes on three previous award-winning projects. JON NICHOLSON: Auto Exposure Jon takes us through his 40-year career in sports reportage, documenting the culture of everything from Formula 1 (featuring the likes of Ayrton Senna and Damon Hill) to banger racing, as well as some of his other work. SIMON HILL & JOHN BULMER: The North Revisited John Bulmer's colour images of northern England taken in the 1960s and '70s remain a cornerstone of British documentary photography. Simon Hill recently revisited those communities and they discuss their two bodies of work. KRISHNA SHETH: Life on the Picture Desk Recently appointed Director of Photography for The Economist, Krishna will talk about her career, which began as a picture researcher at the Express newspaper, before becoming Deputy Photography Director at The Telegraph Magazine. JILLIAN EDELSTEIN: Sharing the Story Jillian shares stories related to managing reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa, personal stories linked to Ukraine and Palestine, and local stories on a range of topics. Plus, how commercial work helps to fund the personal projects. CAROL ALLEN-STOREY: Telling Women's Stories Carol discusses her humanitarian documentary work photographing issues affecting women and children around the world for NGOs such as UNICEF, Save the Children and Comic Re LAURA PANNACK: Documentary Portraiture Laura discusses her portraiture and social documentary work, which has been extensively exhibited and published worldwide, including at the National Portrait Gallery, the Houses of Parliament, Somerset House and the Royal Festival Hall. Terms and Conditions Competitions close at midday on 24/07/25 and the winners will be drawn and notified within one week of the closing date. If our winner fails to respond after two attempts at contact and within one week of the first contact, a new winner will be drawn. The draw is final and no correspondence will be entered into. Entry is free and open to residents of the UK aged over 18. Only one entry permitted per person, no bulk entries will be accepted. No cash alternative. The prize is not transferable. The prize from Kelsey Media Ltd, publishers of Amateur Photographer, is valid for the Festival of Photography – Documentary, taking place at the Royal Geographical Society in London on 9th August 2025. Entrants to the prize draw consent to Kelsey Publishing Ltd receiving their contact details in order to select a winner. Employees of Kelsey Media Ltd and any other persons or employees of companies associated with this Competition and members of the families and households of any such persons, are not eligible to enter this Competition. Any such entries will be invalid.
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.
