Quantum
HEALTH
Issue 10 March 2011
B
lack, brown, red, yellow, white. Malaysian, Peruvian, Nigerian, North American, Scottish, Slovenian... In this age of global economy and cyberspace connectivity, we’re one human family, right? We are if you ask master photographer David Trood.
Originally from Australia and now living in Denmark, David is a photographer with many accolades to his credit, including being designated a Master Photographer in 2006 by Hasselblad, the makers of one of the premier cameras in the world. Over the course of his career, David undertook a personal journey to explore the heart of creativity. Along the way he became fascinated by the more metaphysical aspects of vision, the eye, light, connectedness and the essence of humanity. His exploration went from physical and emotional to spiritual as he began investigating the concept of how we are all one yet we remain so disconnected from each other. While he sought to capture each subject’s essence in his photographs, he wondered what we would look like if we were all one. From that question an idea for a project formed–to capture the face of humanity. After photographing more than 600 people who proportionally represented all the major ethnicities of the world, David was able to create a portrait of the ‘human man’, ‘human woman’, and the combined genderless ‘Face of Humanity’. In this interview he explains his project and discusses his ideas about creativity and connectedness.
Q 8 Quantum Health
David, tell us about your becoming a photographer.
Well, I started taking pictures when I was sixteen years old, with a homemade darkroom in a wool shed! I was lucky to get a job at a newspaper as a young apprentice when I was about seventeen. I spent a few years in Brisbane, Australia, and then a few years in Sydney, and after that I went off traveliing through Asia and came to Denmark in about 1991 with my Danish wife. I freelanced in Copenhagen from about 1991 to today, and during that period I’ve taken photos for just about every Danish magazine and a huge handful
of Danish companies. I haven’t done a lot of work for overseas customers, but a lot of my work has been used in overseas campaigns through Getty Images. I got a contract with Getty Images about seven years ago. Also about seven years ago I started travelling and taking images more for myself and just trying to find pictures from around the world that I thought were interesting enough to put into the Getty online catalogue, making those pictures available all over the world. I have one of the most diverse collections of photos on Getty. I can do studio pictures, nature pictures, portraits, wildlife, creative shots, documentary shots.
In 2006 I was awarded the Hasselblad Master Award. Every year Hasselblad designates twelve photographers from around the world who use their cameras as Master photographers, using their work as an example of excellence in photography.
Q
Tell us a little bit about what you documented in your book At Any Given Moment (
www.atanygivenmoment.com), in which you detail how you came up with the idea of capturing the face of humanity. It became almost a life mission for you. Please explain the personal journey that led you to this project and what it’s all about.
The question that started the whole project–and at that time I had no idea about the face of humanity when I started working on that book. But the book is a sort of journey back through my life trying to figure out where inner creativity came from, the inner voice, or whatever you’d like to call it. And as I progressed through the book and understanding more and more about the connection to my own creativity, I sort of had a realisation that all the knowledge that I had was only available because of all the other people who ever existed, because every bit of information is carried on and on and on, not just through our genes or our memories, but in lots of different ways. And so creativity basically, for me, became the vision of a combination of the creativity of everybody, of everybody’s different perceptions. I basically had a vision, inside my mind: I could see people looking directly at me and changing
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