Nigel Dickinson: Biography

Nigel Dickinson is a Paris-based documentary photographer focusing on the environment, human rights, culture, and identity. After graduating from Sheffield University in 1982, he began a series on public protest in England, and later spent several months photographing apartheid in South Africa.

His work on the Birmingham miner's strike in the mid-1980s was published and toured by the Arts Council of Great Britain. He later moved to South East Asia to document the devastation wrought by logging in indigenous communities, which earned him a bronze award from the United Nations Environment Programme's photography competition.

In the early 1990s, he began documenting the Roma festival at Saintes Maries de la Mer in France. The resulting book, Sara: Le pelerinage des gitans, was published in 2003. His work also took him to the Balkans, where he continued his work on Roma, as well as other displaced peoples, and to Central and South America, where he photographed street children, the aftermath of the Guatemalan civil war, the Yanomami Indians in the Amazon, and climate change. In 1997, he was awarded a World Press prize for his work on mad cow disease.

His photographs are widely published in outlets including Le Figaro, Stern, Geo, D Republicca, Marie Claire, Mare, and La Vanguardia. In 2000, for his work on Roma, he was a runner-up for the Eugene Smith Award. Parts of this work have also been exhibited by the European Union and shown at Visa Pour L'image. He continues his project on Roma across the world, most recently traveling to the Americas and working in Spain, where he is shooting a documentary film. He is represented by Polaris.