“I’m here to celebrate you, I’m here to put you on a pedestal, I’m here to make you feel special, please present yourself at your very best and at your very proudest.”

That was the line spoken by a British photographer Jimmy Nelson to the tribesmen of the world when he traveled to the most remote areas of 14 countries on an attempt to visit and take photographs of 31 secluded tribes with his 50-yeas-old plate camera.

His project is called “Before They Pass Away.” As dramatic as it sounds, it is a compilation of dramatic photographs of the last tribesmen before they, together with their cultures, pass away.

Jimmy explained in an interview that he was inspired by Edward Curtis whose photographs of American Indians (which took him 30 years to photograph) were thrown into someone’s basement because were deemed valueless. However, years later they were taken out and  were “hailed as the ultimate ethnographic document of that time,” as Jimmy himself put it.

His journey was indeed not an easy one. There was one tribe that refused to pose and insisted him to drink vodka with them instead. He agreed, got drunk until he peed himself and found a herd of a reindeer trampled down his teepee (a conical tent)  the next morning because it was attracted to the salt in his pee. The Tsaatan people also at first was very closed, but by him being a complete laughing stock of the group, they finally started to open up.

Jimmy also said that when he took the photograph of three Kazakh men, it took him four days because there wasn’t enough light during the first 3 days. On the fourth day, when he was taking off his gloves to photograph them, his gloves literally froze to the camera. He began to cry but when he turned around, he saw two women standing there. One woman took his fingers and put them into her armpits until he felt warm enough to take a picture.

The iconic photographs of these indigenous tribes have been exhibited in various exhibitions  and documented into a 400-page hard copy book.

Jimmy indeed did an impressive job in photographing these tribes. It is ironic though, the fact that these cultures are disappearing and while Jimmy perhaps is the first one to photograph them, maybe, he will be the last one as well.

Text by Siti Hartinah Putri