Interview | Kim Coppes & Jimmy Nelson – DEEL 2

K: There are many things you can speak about correct?
J: I think the essence of what i am trying to talk about is authenticity. Authenticity as humans beings. We are becoming digitalized. But we are losing a sence of authenticity, a piece of identity. What i lost as a kid. As one individual. What was taken away from me, mentally, physically, estetically. I spend the last majority of my adult life looking for a validity. Everything what you see here en what i do. I am taken pictures, telling stories and making films, it is actually not about them it is about me.

It sounds selfish, it sounds indulgent but it is very honest. It is who am I and where do I fit? Than I went on a journey of.

Did you find the place where you fit in? I am getting there, but that is also the essence of a journey. You never get there, it is the proces. I have know started the journey a few years ago. You begin to find peace. How do you say it, tevredenheid met wie ik ben en wie ik niet ben. And at if you take it back miles away tot he end. I want to do, or see what you do or which camera should I buy? Or where should I go? And I say: No! I had nothing to do with the camera. There is only one place you should go and that is the mirror, who are you looking at? That hurts in my case because I didn’t like what I saw. But you have to keep going. Than you look beyond what you see and you go beyond what you feel. When you come across those truths. You begin to indulgents what you are and what you are not. That is now me and the pictures that I take and the pictures that I tell. It is very exentric and very odd. It is very particulair but it is very authentic.

I have a stupid analogy. You start life with ten fingers. Most of us pretend that 8 are very good. And 2 of them are not very good and we are really good at 8 fingers. I think I am very good at one half of a finger left. The rest I cut off metaphorically. The last half I am really really good at. I am so in touch of that, it is a stupid metphore. You need the focus, the four things happened in my childhood. They where the chopping of the fingers methaporically. There is one last stump over and I have to be very good at something I have to be very good at something. To survive I am going to have to use that stump. Everything else is gone. Dignity, self-respect and i am not exaggerating. Wow, oke if I want to carry on and fit in society and do something, I have to become very good at that. On the way to tevredenheid.There was once a wise person who said: after you speak, people will not remember the words you said. But they will remember how you make them feel. How you want your audience to feel years after? To completely forget me, because i am irrelevant. But to learn to feel themselves. Someone asked me the other day: Where would you advice them to go? But it is not about going on that journey, that plane, that camera. If is about finding focus with yourself. It is nota bout me, you have to forget me.

I am just on of the othter 7,5 billion other living souls living on this planet. I become a little piece of dust and I left a few pictures behind and it all will become irrelevant. It is about that changes the other persons.

That is the person is completely different to me. The person remembers the change that they made for themselves. Who they will become is completely different to me. It is such an exentric and weird, beautifully and fulfilling life but it can’t be your life. I won’t act of feel or think like you.

K: But you can move and touch people?

J: I haven’t been doing public speaking for long. I don’t have any training. I don’t like to say it is me, I want to say it is we. I am finding ways to invert it, to put the audience on the podium.

K: How do you do that?
J: By the experience I have in the field with making pictures. I can’t communicate with the people I meet. I can’t speak their language, the only thing I can do is being very humble, very vulnerable, very emotional, I become Mr. Bean. Mr Bean goes around the planet without saying a word. He is physical, emotional and extremely vulnerable. And we all understand what he is doing. That is what I become for the camera.

What do you do fort he audiences? You always have to groups, you have people they don’t prepare and you have people who prepare for the audience? I have a pallet of stories and there is a abundance of stories. What is the theme of the day? Who are they? Are there females or males? What are there experiences? What are they hoping to get out of this? Some want to here about the internaat, some of them want to here about the lenght of your lence.