Picture Perfect: James Mollison

James Mollison

In this episode of Picture Perfect we visit James Mollison at his studio in Venice, Italy where he discusses group and individual identity and how his thoughts on the subject has informed the perspectives of his projects. We then travel with Mollison to Kenya where he sets out to photograph the huge variety of people at the Dadaab Refuge Camp in Kenya, the world's oldest and largest refugee camp that sits in the desert on the Kenya-Somalia border.

Bonus Footage

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.

About James Mollison

James Mollison was born in Kenya in 1973 and grew up in England. After studying Art and Design at Oxford Brookes University, and later film and photography at Newport School of Art and Design, he moved to Italy to work at Benetton’s creative lab, Fabrica. His work has been widely published throughout the world including by Colors, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian Magazine, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and Le Monde. His book Disciples was published in October 2008 following its first exhibition at Hasted Hunt Gallery in New York. In 2007, he published The Memory of Pablo Escobar — the extraordinary story of ‘the richest and most violent gangster in history’ told by hundreds of photographs gathered by Mollison. It was the original follow-up to his work on the great apes – widely seen as an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, London, and in the book James & Other Apes (Chris Boot, 2004). Mollison lives in Venice with his wife.