At the age of 13, Nick Danziger arrived in Paris with neither plane ticket nor passport, embarking upon the first of many adventures to come. The London-born, Monaco and Switzerland-raised photographer was by nature and nurture a citizen of the world. His father was a New Yorker, son of a farmer in turn of the century Brooklyn, with Danziger evoking scenes from a bygone world while speaking with a mid-Atlantic accent. “I didn’t feel particularly British. In fact, there were a lot of things I didn’t like about Britain,” Danziger says. “But it’s also like T.S. Eliot once said, ‘And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started.’”
Danziger first returned to London as a young man to study painting and drawing at Chelsea School of Art where he earned an MFA and secured representation at the Robert Fraser Gallery. But wanderlust transformed him into a photographer. In 1982, he began an 18-month trip along ancient trade routes from Turkey to China. Traveling through Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan on foot and local transport disguised as an itinerant Muslim, he chronicled his extraordinary quest in the bestselling Danziger’s Travels (1987) and further journeys in Danziger’s Adventures: From Miami to Kabul (1993).
With his vaunted position as a top photojournalist, Danziger returned once again to the land of his birth. “Being successful, people were always asking me about foreign places and I thought, well actually, a similar journey could be done in the UK,” he says. “Initially when my work was in colour, people would say, ‘Oh wow, it’s so exotic!’ And I was like, ‘But you know the people living there don’t have that experience, that’s not what they are living through.’ Then I came to think, in the UK, there are a lot of paradoxes too.”
