Nick Danziger

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2003

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the photo journalist Nick Danziger. Nick was born in London but grew up in Monaco and Switzerland. He developed a taste for adventure and travel from a young age, and, inspired by the comic-strip Belgian reporter Tintin, took off on his first trip to Paris aged 13. Without passport or air ticket, he managed to enter the country and travel around, selling sketches to make money.

Nick's initial ambition was to be an artist, and he attended art school, got an MA and representation in a gallery. But his desire for travel remained - he applied and was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship in 1982 and used it to follow ancient trade routes - he travelled on foot or traditional local transport from Turkey to China and documented his adventures in diaries. The diaries formed his first book, the best-selling Danziger's Travels, and he never looked back. He has since travelled around the world taking photographs and in 1991 made his first documentary in Afghanistan, War Lives and Videotape, based on children abandoned in the Marastoon mental asylum in Kabul. It was shown as part of the BBC's video diaries series and won the Prix Italia for best television documentary series.

Nick has since travelled the world taking photographs and making documentaries about the people he has met. He has published four books, including his latest, The British, for which he returned to his roots.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Girl From Ipanema by Stan Getz Book: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Luxury: Pencils, paper and watercolours

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a photojournalist. He doesn't stand back from the
0:27.4	pictures he takes but involves himself in the lives of those whom his
0:31.3	camera captures. He was born with a sense of adventure. At the age of
0:35.8	22 he won a traveling bursary and spent the money on an 18-month journey through Afghanistan,
0:41.3	Pakistan, Tibet and China. He was held hostage, he was robbed,
0:45.2	and later he recorded his experiences in a best-selling book. Since then he's
0:50.4	returned frequently to Afghanistan to make television documentaries about the country and its people.
0:55.2	He's also turned his stills camera on his native country Britain,
0:59.1	picturing the lives of its dispossessed and its privileged.
1:06.4	These days he lives in Monaco with children from Afghanistan whom he's adopted. I've gone to dangerous areas because I wanted to, he says.
1:11.1	I love photography and I love
1:13.0	teaching it teaching it's an exchange he is Nick Danziger
1:17.0	you're very difficult to categorize as it were Nick because I say photojournalist which implies journalism which implies
1:24.9	objectivity and yet you cross that line all of the time don't you involvement is
1:28.9	what you do absolutely I think it's very difficult to be objective for certainly when you get involved in these
1:33.8	very difficult areas of the world and for me the most important thing is people's
1:39.0	lives how they're trying to get on in very difficult circumstances.
1:42.1	So you're always focusing on the individual story?
1:44.7	Always individuals.
1:45.8	For me, it's very much about how people are getting on in the face of usually terrible
	...

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