A child of the Longhorn Miao tribe, photographed by Jimmy Nelson in Liupanshui, China, in 2016.

A member of the Maasai people in the Serengeti in Tanzania, 2010.

A Marquesan girl in Atuona, on the island of Hiva Oa, French Polynesia, 2016.

A Nenets reindeer herder from the Yamal Peninsula, in the Ural Mountains of Siberia, 2011.

Gogine boys in Goroka, Papua New Guinea, 2010.

A child of the Sudosukai clan, part of the Wodaabe nomads, at the Gerewol Festival, in Chad, 2016.

Members of the Kazakh people in Altantsogts, in the Bayan-Ölgii province of Mongolia, 2011.

A Chukchi family in Chukotka, Siberia, 2012.

Buddhist monks at the Ganden Monastery, in Tibet, 2011.

A member of the Maori people at the Gisborne Festival, on the North Island of New Zealand, 2011.

*Top,* Kaluli men on Mount Bosavi, in the Southern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea, 2017; *above,* members of the Himba people in the Hartmann Valley of Serra Cafema, Namibia, 2005.

A Kazakh boy in Bayan-Ölgii, Mongolia, 2017.

The Secret Life of Jimmy Nelson

A new book collects the former advertising executive turned intrepid photographer’s shots of Indigenous peoples from Siberia to Nepal to Kenya

The British photographer Jimmy Nelson was born in 1967. His father was a geologist for Shell, and by the time Jimmy was a toddler he’d lived in Africa, Asia, and South America. When he turned seven, he was uprooted from the family home in Nigeria and enrolled at Stonyhurst College, a serious-minded Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire, in North West England.

There was a lot of rain, not to mention drab school uniforms, Catholic Mass, and 1,000 other boys. Used to roaming the plains of Africa, Nelson didn’t adapt well. “I was marginalized from the beginning, and ostracized,” he told The New York Times in 2013. When he was 16, an allergic reaction to malaria medication led him to develop a condition called alopecia totalis. He lost his hair overnight. “Looking back,” he said, “it seems clear my fascination with appearance, what one looks like, with individual expression, with eccentricity, originates in wanting to be understood.”