Picture Perfect featuring James Mollison

We are proud to release the fifth and final episode of this season’s Picture Perfect, a brand new photography show dedicated to documenting our favorite photojournalists.

In this episode, Picture Perfect visits James Mollison at his studio in Venice, Italy. Mollison explains the importance of repetition in creating the narratives within his portrait series works, such as his series on the great apes James & Other Apes, which has been widely seen as an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, and Where Children Sleep, his latest book release that originated as a commissioned project for the children’s charity Save the Children.

We then travel with Mollison to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya, the world’s oldest and largest refugee camp that sits in the desert on the Kenya-Somalia border in the northeast of the country. Built to house 90,000 people, Dadaab now has a population of over 300,000 with 1,300 new refugees arriving every day. Made-up of three camps, Hagadera, Ifo and Dagahaley, the refugees arrive from Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan and all across the horn of Africa fleeing civil war, drought and famine.

Mollison set out to photograph the huge variety of people that live in the camps, from new arrivals to third generation children. He set up simple backdrops that remove the subjects from the chaos that surrounds them to create striking personal portraits that convey the emotion and life that exists within the sprawl.

A special thank you to Doctors Without Borders, which made our visit to Dadaab possible. Their commitment and tireless dedication has saved hundreds of lives. Do your part to help by donating.

Be sure to checkout our exclusive bonus footage where Mollison recounts the story behind his “found photographs” book, The Memory of Pablo Escobar, a personal look into the life of the most notorious drug dealer in history.