An interview 35 years in the making – Nick Danziger
An interview 35 years in the making – Nick Danziger
WEM Founder Mark Hannaford was destined for a life based on the expeditions, but he stumbled across the remarkable book by newly minted photojournalist Nick Danziger; ‘Danziger’s Travels’. It was a book that influenced his and many others’ lives, and it has taken him 35 years to track Nick down and convince him to be interviewed, his perseverance wasn’t wasted. #thelongeststalk. Nick and Mark are joined by WEM Medical Director Dr Will Duffin in this fantastic interview of adventure, inspiration and lifechanging experiences.
Nick Danziger, Photojournalist, and Humanitarian
Biography
Nick Danziger was born in London but grew up in Monaco and Switzerland. He developed a taste for adventure and travel from a young age and, inspired by the comic-strip Belgian reporter Tintin, took off on his first solo trip to Paris aged 13. Without a passport or air ticket, he managed to enter the country and travel around, selling sketches to make money. Nick’s initial ambition was to be an artist, and he later attended The Chelsea School of Art, where he gained an MA in Fine Art and was soon represented by the Robert Fraser Gallery.
But his desire for travel remained. In 1982, he applied for and was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship, and used it to follow ancient trade routes, travelling on foot or by traditional local transport from Turkey to China, documenting his adventures in diaries. The diaries and photographs formed his first book, the best selling Danziger’s Travels in 1987, and a second book, Danziger’s Adventures, followed in 1993. His third book, published in 1996, Danziger’s Britain, was a social and political commentary on the state of Britain, and was said by the UK’s Independent newspaper to be, “so important that every one of us should read it and weep”.
His photographic book, The British (2001), was awarded Best Monochrome Illustrated Book by The British Book Design & Production Awards in 2002, and was selected by The Sunday Times as one of its Photography Books of The Year.
He has since travelled the world taking photographs and making documentary films, and has become one of the world’s most renowned photojournalists. His photographs have appeared in newspapers and magazines worldwide, toured museums and galleries internationally, and are held in numerous museum collections including the National Portrait Gallery in London, the National Media Museum in Bradford and Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow.
He has won several prestigious awards for his photography including, in 2004, the World Press Photo 1st Prize in the Single Portrait Award for his ‘mirror’ image of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush. The picture was taken during Danziger’s 30-day, ground-breaking study of a Prime Minister at war.
His documentary work is also award-winning. In June 1991, his documentary video film ‘War, Lives and Videotape’, based on the children abandoned in Marastoon mental asylum in Kabul, won the prestigious Prix Italia for Best Television Documentary.
In 2007, he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society, and he is the holder of the Royal Geographical Society’s Ness Award in recognition of raising public understanding of contemporary social, political and environmental issues through documentary films and photography. In 1996 he was nominated for Journalist of The Year by the Royal Television Society and in 2021 an Honorary Fellow of Extreme & Wilderness Medicine.
Nick has spent much of the last 25 years photographing the world’s most dispossessed and disadvantaged. More recent photography projects have included a study of the impact of armed conflict on women and travel to eight of the world’s poorest countries to meet individuals living in extreme poverty. The aim was to document the progress being made towards meeting the eight ‘Millennium Development Goals’ set by the United Nations to eradicate poverty by 2015.
Links
TEDx Talk;- Capturing the Spark of Others in Images | Nick Danziger
Nicks publications also available on Amazon