PDN - May 2012

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target, or anything like that. It’s still “stick to your creativity in photography.” Take whaling, for instance. A photographer might be on a ship for two months, with a crew out to hassle whalers. The brief would be to show life on board. It could be about day-to-day activities, but we also [ask the photographer] to send out hard news pictures.

Bleed top, bottom and outside edge.

PDN: A two-month assignment? They’re that long? JN: That’s not typical. They’re all very different. I’m with Greenpeace International, so we work in remote locations. Assignments can be two or three weeks. Then there are Greenpeace offices in various countries. Their assignments tend to be much shorter—a day or two.

PDN: How do you source photographers for those
projects?
JN: We don’t work with agencies because the rights are
complicated, so we like to work with independent pho-
tographers. We select geographically, and by skills. The
people we’re talking about know how they can get their
own pictures that we will like and the media will like.

PDN: How do you find photographers? JN: We have various campaigns—climate, oceans, toxics, forests—and I have a good database of photographers who know [those] subjects. For the nuclear campaign, the database includes photographers who have done that work before. It can be dangerous, so you don’t go in willy-nilly. In Fukushima, for instance, we hired Robert Knoth, a Dutch photographer who has done a lot of work in Chernobyl.

PDN: What gets you to take a chance on new
photographers?
JN: Often people come through the national offices,
doing smaller scale stuff, and we’ll try them out for a
couple of weeks on a Greenpeace ship.

PDN: Do a lot of photographers approach you for work? JN: Things are really changing. When I go to [the photo festival] Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, France, there are queues of photographers and agents who want to see me. There’s this realization that NGOs have resources.

PDN: Does it have to do with magazine assignments
drying up?
JN: Absolutely. Photographers used to be snobby about
working with NGOs. That almost doesn’t exist anymore.
Most would be quite happy to be commissioned by an
NGO. But it takes a different mindset.

PDN: How so?

JN: You’re working as part of a team, and the whole focus is on the Greenpeace story. Some photographers feel imprisoned by that. We’ve hired high profile photographers, and it has gone wrong because of that; they say, “I produce my stories, nobody tells me what to do.”

PDN: And you’re asking for what instead? JN: When you’re covering an earthquake as a journalist, off you go, at your own freedom. But with Greenpeace, the brief is much tighter. In Fukushima, it was about the Greenpeace team monitoring radioactivity. Having said that, there are certain jobs that are much freer. For a series we did on climate impacts, we explored desertification on the Tibetan plateau with a team of scientists. That was more akin to journalism.