The photographer who took on America's gun nuts: ‘I'd get death threats in the night'

Telegraph

19-04-2025

'I was lucky,' says the photographer Zed Nelson, 'until I went to Afghanistan.' The 57-year-old, who has just won the Sony World Photographer of the Year award for The Anthropocene Illusion, his masterful 2024 series about our relationship to the natural world, is making us tea in his north London kitchen and talking about his early years as a documentary photographer.
'I was very drawn towards… I don't want to say 'extreme situations', but they were highly political – life or death. Often there was a kind of geopolitical storyline behind it, like the Cold War and how countries are used as proxies.'
Nelson began his career as a ­freelance photographer in 1990, working for the Independent, the Observer, Arena and The Face (as well as, later, The Telegraph Magazine). His work often took him into situations fraught with danger, where 'there's no police, no regular army, just warring factions… When you're younger, you have more idealism, you have more naïveté. You also have more ego, and a sense that nothing bad can happen to you.'
He shot stories in Cambodia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Africa and other flash-points and war zones. He recalls how his front-page images of famine in Somalia in 1992 for the Independent brought television reporters to the region; how The Face featured his photograph of a boy soldier in Angola wearing a colourful football shirt and holding a wad of cash. On the other hand, Nelson contracted dengue fever in French Guiana, and malaria in Angola, where he broke two teeth when he passed out from the effects of the disease.
Things came to a head in Kabul in 1994. 'It was after the Soviets had been forced out [in 1989], and it was just Mujahideen warlords fighting. I went to Afghanistan to do a story about this forgotten war that just wouldn't end. It was also about Médecins Sans Frontières, who were the last aid agency there. All the others had left.
'And then I was in a car that got ambushed. We turned a corner, and the car was machine-gunned to pieces by two groups. I had an interpreter who got shot through the neck. The bullet sort of lodged in his face, but he survived. And the journalist I was with put his hands up over his head and had his arms kind of shot out. The bones were fragmented. He had to have skin grafts and nerve grafts, have his arms rebuilt. I didn't get hit, but at that moment, when people are screaming, and there's blood everywhere, and bullets are literally puncturing the car, my feeling was, 'I want to go home now'. It's not like a Hollywood movie. It was just like, 'Please can it stop? Can I go?''
The injured journalist was the future founder of Wallpaper magazine, Tyler Brûlé, who would come up with the idea for the publication while recovering in a hospital bed. Nelson would change direction, too, taking on a project in the US, from where, he notes, many of the weapons came. 'I'd seen that the guns were [mostly] Russian Kalashnikovs or American M-16s – that was true in El Salvador, in Angola, Afghanistan. Again, it was the proxy thing. Both Russia and America wanted to control these countries. And I thought: I'm not going to photograph Africa in grainy black-and-white any more. I'll photograph America, and their massive gun industry and the results of having guns in that society – 30,000 people shot and killed every year.' (Things have only got worse: in 2023, the figure was nearly 47,000.)
The series of photographs he shot became the 1999 book Gun Nation, which was featured in 24 magazines worldwide. Among its most startling images were a portrait of a couple honeymooning at a desert shooting range, and a father holding his baby with one hand and a semi-automatic pistol in the other. There were also ­photographs from the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, where 12 children and a teacher were killed by two students in a pre-planned massacre.
'People were reeling,' Nelson recalls, 'and everyone was like, 'pray for healing'. 'We thought we were in the safest place in America' was always the mantra. But down the road was the gun shop, and you're like, 'You don't need to pray for healing. You just need to sort that out'.'
The book brought hostility to Nelson's door. After appearing on US radio stations publicising his work, he began receiving death threats at home in London. 'It'd be the middle of the night, I'd pick up the phone, and it'd be like, 'You f---ing a--hole, I'm gonna hunt you down.' It was not funny. It probably was just some t--- being an idiot, but it was enough to make me ring the police.'
Since then, Nelson has worked on a string of thought-provoking long-term projects, from his 2009 book and film Love Me, about the pervasiveness of Western beauty ideals, to his 2019 film The Street – four years in the making – about the effects of gentrification on a single street in east London. Finally, The Anthropocene Illusion will bring him the stardom he deserves, though he plays it down: 'When you work on these projects for a long time, you question if it's going to work. It's very time-consuming and expensive. So it's massively gratifying to get the award, because it makes it feel worthwhile.'
In this series, which he began six years ago, he turns his gift for storytelling to the way our craving for connection with nature – even as we cause its vanishing – leads to us recreating it in illusory form in zoos, theme parks and museums, as well as garden cities, national parks and wildlife reserves. Each image contains a narrative that sets the mind whirring. In Singapore, for instance, luxuriant greenery transforms the façade of a hotel, yet as Nelson points out, 'irrigating the plants breeds mosquitoes. So they have to kill all the insects. And when you do that, you kill the birds as well. So in order to have a beautiful, natural-looking city, they have to make it entirely unnatural.'
One photograph of a chimpanzee sitting on a man-made rock in Shanghai Wild Animal Park, China, encapsulates the way that the fake and the real intertwine. The walls are painted with exotic scenes of a lake surrounded by plant life, which, Nelson notes, are purely for the zoo's visitors; they don't conjure a natural environment for the animal. 'Then there's the hatch, the door,' he adds. 'Which begs the thought: where does it go? 'And of course, it's not onto the plains of Africa. It opens into a barred cage where the chimpanzee sleeps.'
Nelson saw the possibility of this melancholy image when he first arrived at the park, but it took the chimpanzee 'a day and a half' to return to its pose. The waiting forced a new perspective on him. 'Zoos are designed for a kind of conveyor belt of humanity. But when you disrupt that, you see the cruelty, the boredom, the con­fusion of the animal, and the frustration of a creature in confinement. After two days, you also start sharing some of its feelings.'
Other striking images stir the imagination. In Kenya, an Out of Africa champagne-picnic experience laid out in the Maasai Mara reserve conjures a romantic vision of colonial times for high-value tourists – 'and a Maasai warrior is also paid to be in the scene, to give it this added twist of 'authenticity'. Make of it what you will, but it's all just one big fantasy.'
Nelson was born in Africa himself, in Uganda, in 1967. His first name is actually Zik, after the popular 1960s Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe. He adopted 'Zed' after a picture editor mistook his suggestion that he credit him simply as 'Z Nelson'. His parents were journalists, who had left the UK in their early 20s for the east African state. 'My dad ended up editing a newspaper there, then that became a problem, because any kind of free press under Idi Amin was a problem.' (The Ugandan army general seized power in a 1971 coup and would preside over a murderous dictatorship for the next eight years.)
At one point, Nelson's father was dragged away in the night. 'I've asked my mother about it. There were soldiers on the roof and coming through the front door, and my mum was screaming, 'Don't take my babies'. It was terrifying for her. God knows what my dad thought. He plays everything down.'
Nelson's father was released. But the family decided to leave Uganda and return to the UK with four-year-old Zik and his elder sister. It wasn't the end of their wanderings. 'When I was eight, they decided to drive overland to India in a converted ambulance… We literally set off from our house, and it took a year to get there and back.' He would also spend a couple of years at an international school in Hong Kong, before being sent to 'the worst comprehensive in London. It wasn't like Ofsted 'must do better', it was people being stabbed and parents not being told. There were hardly any exams done by anyone. My horizon line was massively lowered by the ­experience, but luckily, I still had an early background of a much bigger picture of the world.'
After 'a couple of lost years', ­Nelson went back to college to get the qualifications needed to pursue higher education, where he studied film-making and photography. He soon realised that he could push forward more quickly with the ­latter. He still shoots on film. 'Digital cameras are great… but everything's so easy and quick that you don't look at things properly, or sit with things long enough.' He will admit, though, that one shot he took with his iPhone in Oslo's Natural History Museum as a reference for The Anthropocene Illusion was so amazing that it forced him to extend his trip so that he could try to reproduce it on his medium-format camera.
Nelson finds it 'very worrying' that AI could accelerate the vogue for retouched and modified images – not to mention wholly AI-generated photos. He thinks it may reach the point at which 'the sense of wonder and appreciation people have for photographs is eroded because no one really believes in anything.
'If you're a photographer who takes pictures for product shots or advertising or even fashion, you know AI is coming for you,' he says. His hope is that the 'real' becomes something we learn to hold on to tightly. 'There's something about photography,' he muses. 'It's the joy of seeing something and thinking, 'Wow, that existed, that happened'. And if you take those feelings away, you're left with this Orwellian society where we trust and believe in nothing.'