James Mollison (1973, Kenya)
James Mollison was born in Kenya and grew up in England. He has studied art and design at Oxford Brookes University, and film and photography at Newport School of Art and Design. After graduation he moved to Italy in order to work at Benetton´s creative department, Fabrica. Today he lives with his wife in Venice.
At the photography festival in Kristiansund, James Mollison will exhibit a powerful, visual story; Where children sleep. It was Benetton’s Fabrica that asked Mollison to come up with an idea on how to depict “children’s rights”. He began by remembering his bedroom as a child. What did his bedroom say about him as a person and about his life?
James discovered that one way to depict and deal with an issue as vast as “children’s rights” was actually to depict where children sleep – children in different parts of the world and with different social circumstances. He has included the children too, but photographed them away from where they sleep. An effective strategy. The pictures of where the children sleep reveal the great disparities in material wealth in the children’s lives. The portraits depict the children as individuals. In this sense they are all “equal”. The portrait of Alex (aged 9) shows a boy with a twinkle in his eye. He could easily be the son of a Norwegian, American or someone with a similarly high standard of material wealth. Perhaps he eats pizza with his friends after football practice, or perhaps he is more fond of playing computer games? Hardly.
When you see the picture of the “bedroom” belonging to Alex in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, then you understand that he probably doesn’t even go to school. He has too little food, and he certainly isn’t able to play computer games. The place where Alex sleeps is a worn out sofa standing outdoors in front of a wooden shack with a sheet metal roof. Alex is the exact opposite of Kaya (aged 4) from Tokyo, Japan. She looks quite similar to one of the many dolls she has collected and keeps in her room.
James Mollison often works on topical projects, such as in his latest book The Disciples, which came out in 2008. In it, he portrays groups of fans of famous musicians, such as Madonna, Rod Stewart, 50 Cent, The Casualties and many others. The photographs were taken at various music venues around the world. The funny thing is that they all look so similar – and the style of the crowds reflects the style of the artist they are there to listen to. During work on a project called Narcotecture James came across a bag of private photographs in Pablo Escobar’s private jail. In the 1980s Escobar was the leader of Colombia’s largest cocaine cartel, which at that time delivered around 80 percent of the world’s cocaine. Escobar was then considered one of the world’s richest and most violent narcotics gangsters. James became interested in the story of Pablo Escobar, and spent three years travelling around to track down visual material and talk to people who knew the famous gangster. After he had collected hundreds of photographs, the story was published as a book in 2007.
James Mollison’s work has been published in a range of magazines, such as Colors, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and Le Monde.
