Mads Nissen: interview for IQads.ro

He was 19 years old, he was in Mérida and he had bought an old camera. But he wasn’t interested in photographing sunsets or landscapes. Mads Nissen was  preoccupied about the people, the poverty in which some of them lived, the cracks in the buildings. It was then that he realized that photography meant curiosity, social awareness and expression.

Mads Nissen is a Danish documentary photographer, he worked as a staff photographer for the Danish newspaper Politiken and as a freelance photojournalist for Newsweek, Time, Der Spiegel, Stern and The Sunday Times. În 207, he moved to Shanghai, to document the human and social consequences of China’s historic economic rise. In 2015, his photograph of two gay men in St Petersburg, from a series on homophobia in Russia, was selected as World Press Photo of the Year. In 2021 he was nominated, for the prize once again. Nissen has published three photo books: The Fallen, Amazonas and We are Indestructible.

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What is your imprint in photography? How did it change, depending on your stages of training asa photographer?

I’m too young to remember the ‘good old days’. If you put yourself and what ever talent you may have on the side of the poor, the neglected, the vulnerable then it will obviously always be a challenge to make a living yourself no matter your talent. But during this kind of work brings you so much more, something stronger and much more important. It gives your work importance to others. To our world. It’s not just about you anymore. And that is very needed, and even healing on your own mental health,  in this ego-driving-super-greedy society we seem to have Today.

How do you feel this present, so visually strong, in which everyone takes pictures and posts themeverywhere? Is it tiring, is it interesting? 😛

If it was not for ordinary people’s smartphones in their pockets, we would not have the videos of George Floyd, from the protests in Iran, Myanmar – even some of the most hard core footage in the war in Ukraine are not taking by professional photographers, but from go-pro-cameras on the soldiers helmets. It feels like as close as you can get and it’s terrifying. Obviously, those amateurs do not necessarily have the same ethics as a good professional journalist or photographer, so we need to be 100% critical towards this material. And not just the plain manipulation, also what came before and after, what is outside the frame, what are their agenda ect.  

So besides having a trustworthy journalistic ethics, I believe the role of the modern photographer is to actually be able to engage the audience and to bring perspective and contexts on the issue rather than just to simply document it.