TIMOTHY ALLEN IS THE ONLY STILLS PHOTOGRAPHER TO HAVE WORKED WITH THE BBC ON A NATURAL HISTORY SERIES AND HAS SOME SPECTACULAR HUMAN STORIES ABOUT THE MAKING OF THE AWARD-WINNING HUMAN PLANET PROGRAMME. CAROLINE WILKINSON TALKS TO HIM ABOUT SHOOTING THE SERIES AND HIS RECENT TRIPS BACK TO THE FEATURED INDIGENOUS SOCIETIES
TWO YEARS. 40 COUNTRIES. 80 STORIES, eight episodes aired around the world, a book and a DVD. Human Planet is a landmark BBC series: the first ever natural history documentary about man. Each awe-inspiring episode focuses on a human-inhabited environment, including the desert, jungle, mountains and the Arctic, unearthing stories of the planet's remaining indigenous societies. It's a dream come true for most explorers and travel photographers: the chance to document and live with people who survive by their relationships with the natural world in some of the planet's most remote and hostile environments.
Timothy Allen had been photographing global human-interest stories foryears before the BBC took him on for the series: in fact, his adventures are what attracted the BBC as he'd already found a society in Meghalaya, Northern India, that he recommended they visit. Allen had heard about the under-explored area and the native Khasi tribe's 'living root bridges' while backpacking and, intending to stay just a week, he ended up living in a village for a month and half. The bridges, made from an ancient mesh of entwined banyan tree roots, form the bridleways across the rivers and help connect the Khasi villages. According to Allen, the most beautiful of the bridges is Wahthyllong, reportedly 100-150 years old. and was later featured in Human Planet.
Human Planet took four years to complete, but what led to its commission and how did Allen get involved?
"It originally came about because the BBC noticed a surge of interest in all things indigenous and tribal, what with Bruce Parry's series Tribe being super successful, so the Natural History unit pitched an idea to use its cameramen to study the human species, which it hadn't done before: they usually focus on David Attenborough and nature. It's quite tricky to make a natural history programme about man: you can't touch upon spiritual beliefs or religion, and the BBC only wanted stories showing man directly interacting with nature," explains Allen.
"The reason I got involved is because the researchers for the series contacted me for ideas as I had done lots of stuff like this in the past. I told them about Meghalaya, gave them some other ideas, and the dialogue started from there. There was no job going, they weren't advertising for a photographer, I pitched it to the producer of the series who had the foresight to bring me onboard. I naively assumed that all these big projects, like Planet Earth and Life, had dedicated photographers, but they don't, they don't put much emphasis on photography. In the past, images for the books and press come from either file pictures or the production team who shot them while on location, but, of course, none of them are professional photographers.
It made sense with the Natural History unit because often these guys are in a hide for four weeks at a time trying to film a bird, so it doesn't make sense to have a photographer there, too. But with Human Planet, because it's all about people, and were a more predictable species, if someone 1 says they are going to climb a tree, we know roughly when they are going to do it in order to capture it.
"My purpose for being there was split between the book and BBC Worldwide that used the images for publicity. DVDs, websites and so on. As the photographer of the series, when we launch in a new country, I go out there to hype it up, to show the pictures and tell stories about how it was done. There were 30 cameramen in all, but I was the only photographer, which meant I got to travel to most of the locations, getting a good overview of the whole series-more so than the directors.
The production teams were split into four groups, comprising a director, researcher, producer and a few cameramen. My job was to liaise with the teams, find out where they were and what they were doing and find a way of visiting them wherever they were in the world. It was impossible to do them all, so I had to make my choice and work out which of the shoots were viable and more valuable. I got to nearly half of the stories and nearly all the good ones: there were a couple I missed that I was really disappointed about, like the Papua New Guinea Tree People tribes. The team hired four private aircrafts to get there because it was so remote, but I literally couldn't make it from where I was in the middle of Mongolia. If I missed one of their planes, that was it. That happened on a couple of shoots: it was just logistically impossible to get me there as it often required specialist equipment, too."
Quite often, Allen would not bother coming home between shoots if they were in the same part of the world, spending nearly two years going from shoot to shoot. When he did come home, it would be for a couple of days-or even hours - sitting in Heathrow airport, waiting to go out again. For some, this would be difficult, but Allen was in his element: “It was relentless, but there was so much to do. I had a list of things to see and places to visit. I couldn't take time off -1 knew I'd regret it in the future. How often does someone get the chance to live with the M'baka people in the Central African Republic?" One of the first things that came to mind when speaking to Allen about his nomad experience was the amount of equipment he must have to carry to be able to cover each shoot - and he didn't have a private line to Canon, like some pros.
"I'm very self- sufficient when it comes to gear. I travel with one rucksack as hand luggage containing everything I need to shoot a story, except for a big tripod, which I rarely use anyway, and my Ikelite underwater housing, which went with the main luggage. I always carry two Canon EOS 5D Mkll bodies - alt the Canon primes up to 400mm and a 16-35mm /2.8. film equipment, like an eyepiece and sound kit for when I switch to HD video, a laptop and five 1TB hard drives. I also have a Newswear vest - it's fantastic because you can have six lenses on you at any one time.
"I'm very specific about what I want to do and how I want to do it. which is why I work with primes. I usually always have the 50mm f/1.2 and 85mm f/1.2 attached to the two bodies. You can't beat a prime lens for quality. Since leaving The Independent six years ago, I've never used flash as I love natural light. Rare lighting situations make the best pictures and they're usually delicate lighting situations that zoom lenses can't pick up.
I love dark, dingy places, and prime lenses allow you to open wide and to shoot by candlelight or in caves. If I could choose. I'd only shoot at sunrise and sunset as this when the light is the most incredible, but fast lenses are all you can really use to get a good result. Zooms, which normally have a maximum aperture off/3.5, simply don't allow your camera to see in to the darkness. I used the 50mm f/1.8 for years, it's really cheap - everyone can get one - and aside from the cost the differences between the f/1.8 and f/1.2 are minimal: I just like knowing I have the best of the best equipment."
On average, each shoot took between two and three weeks, partly because the locations were so remote. In some instances, like filming the Kazakh hunters in Western Mongolia, Allen says they had to wait nearly a month to capture the key shot of an eagle catching a fox. Others, like the Mombassa rubbish dump story about a family living and surviving on the Kibarani dump, took only a week, while the replastering of the central mosque in Djenne, Mali, happens one day a year and then it's over. As incredible as the experience was, Allen wouldn't be overly enamoured to work with a film crew again: "The crew's footage always comes first: you can't make a sound during filming, not even the click of your shutter.
If you're used to working alone, it gets to you after a while as you can't shoot what you want, when you want. Fortunately, we all became good mates and worked out a way of doing it. I'd often just find a different aspect of the same shoot to focus on, such as a different family going through the same experiences as the one the cameramen were following."
While the series is centred around the lives of indigenous tribes in remote and extreme locations, Allen never found the shooting situations to be that extreme - except for one. "As surprising as it may be. the only time I've ever had a problem with moisture in a jungle is when I spent three months in the middle of one. If you're going in for a week, it's not something you have to be bothered about.
The worst place you can take your camera is the Arctic or Antarctic, but even there, nothing really goes wrong. As long as you don't have any rubber on your camera (rubber freezes and then breaks) and you know that batteries don't last as long in low temperatures, it's fine. Saying that, I got through six camera bodies in the two years, but if you look at the average spec of a camera shutter's life expectancy, I went through that several times. The only place I did genuinely suffer from the environment was inside Ijen volcano in East Java, when we were shooting sulphur miners. I was standing in the sulphur cloud a lot and didn't realise the sulphur dioxide in the gas screws up metal and I lost both my cameras. When I sent them to Canon, they said all the circuitry was fried.
Statistics show that working in a film crew is a dangerous experience - as you're thinking of so many other things, it’s easy to make a mistake. Every cameraman I know tells one or two stories of a time when, without the training or the right equipment, they would have been really hurt or even died."
You'd think that working with indigenous tribes would be difficult due to the language barrier and their disassociation with the outside world, but even before Human Planet and the aid of a translator, Allen didn't find it very hard. "People overestimate how difficult it is and how unusual it is to interact with completely foreign people who don't know who you are or what you do. But if you spend two or three weeks with anyone, you'd be surprised at how comfortable you become, as you're living in such intimate situations.
We had very little trouble with photography as most were prepared for us to come. If we went to very remote places, the communities were just surprised we were there at all and filming their lives. There were a few places, like southern Ethiopia, where it's very difficult to do it without money changing hands, as so many people have been there before. We tended to make a donation to the community via the chief, like a present of a generator - that way, the community knew they were being compensated."
Timothy shot nearly 40 stories in his two years shadowing the BBC, he's been 19,000ft up in the Himalayas, 40 metres below the South China Sea and embedded within communities living in tropical rainforests and remote deserts, but of all the stories he has to tell, one stands out. "It was a hard shoot: we had to do a six-day trek, called The Chadar, down the frozen Zanskar river in the heart of the Himalayas. But it wasn't this that made it memorable, what touched me were the Ladakhi people. We were doing the trek with incredible children aged six to 14 on their way to boarding school. Most of the people we met were awesome human beings. People complain about the most mundane things in western culture, yet I didn't hear a word of complaint from these kids who all came with us and were risking their lives on their way to school.
To put it in perspective, in the same year, a Belgian man died doing this trek. Proper trekkers train to do this route and use porters and expensive equipment, while the Ladakhi families are doing the same thing with practically nothing: they use Wellington boots in -40°C temperatures. The kids are so incredible and inspiring - they'd still be messing around doing skids on the ice and snowball fights, but I'd always have two or three walking with me, and every now and again I'd get one tapping me on the shoulder telling me to be careful of a dangerous bit.
"Since the show, I've been back to see three families: two in Mongolia and I went back to Meghalaya, Northern India, to see how the Khasi's villages have coped in the world's media spotlight. I was a bit concerned that an influx of outsiders off the back of Human Planet might have destroyed their way of living, even though the village council had asked me to find ways to encourage tourists to their corner of Meghalaya. They wanted to build a tourism industry as they had no other way of generating revenue from the outside world. Thankfully, they're doing fine. Tourism has exploded, but their strong sense of community is holding it together.
"I arrived back from Mongolia a couple of months ago after taking the families the book. It was fascinating to see them interested in the rest of the world. The book is an anthology of the natural places in the world where people still adhere to their native way of life. It's heartwarming to see people realise what they do is interesting to the outside world. So many cultures are letting go of their traditions in favour of the easier western culture." Read more about Timothy Allen's adventures and latest work on blog: timothyallen.blogs.bbcearth.com
TIMOTHY ALLEN : HUMAN PLANET
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