Danziger's Britain

Description

Nick Danziger began his journey in June 1994, as newspapers and magazines throughout the land commemorated the 50th anniversary of the D-Day landings and recalled the Allies' war aims (to "afford assurance that all men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want"). For the best part of a year, he lived among the homeless and unemployed in many of the ruined manufacturing and so-called "no-go" areas of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. With courage and sensitivity, he won the trust of the street children and shared the lives and heard the stories of hundreds of society's outsiders. A powerful and disturbing documentary (with 48 pages of his own photographs) of life in Britain for a forgotten section of society in the mid-1990s, and a tribute to the resilience of individuals faced with overwhelming odds.

Born in 1958 of an American father and an English mother, Nick Danziger went to school in Switzerland, then to Chelsea Art School, later becoming a visiting lecturer at art schools and universities and holding one-man exhibitions of his work in London and New York. In 1982 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to follow ancient trade-routes in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and China. Out of the experience came his first book, Danziger's Travels, which became an immediate bestseller. Nick Danziger 's documentary video film, War, Lives and Videotape' (based on the children abandoned in Marastoon mental asylum in Kabul), shown as part of the BBC's Video Diaries series in 1991, won the Prix Italia for best television documentary, against competition from thirty-two countries. In 1992 he published his second book, Danziger's Adventures: from Miami to Kabul, 'an astonishing record of a man who is rarely at rest...Danziger seeks out death and danger the way other young men seek out sex' (Frank McLynne, Spectator). He was the 1994-95 Fellow in Photography at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford and the Bradford and Ilkley Community College. His photographs have appeared in many newspapers and magazines worldwide, and formed the basis of the recent Channel 4 series Postcards from the Edge, praised by Lynne Truss in The Times as 'quite superb' and by the Independent as 'remarkable' and 'outstanding'. Danziger's second series for Channel 4, The Fight for Hearts and Minds, was nominated for the Grierson Award, and in 1996 he was also nominated for the Journalist of the Year by the Royal Television Society.