James Mollison was born in Kenya in 1973 and grew up in England. After study­ing Art and Design at Oxford Brookes University, and later film and pho­tog­ra­phy at Newport School of Art and Design, he moved to Italy to work at Benetton’s cre­ative lab, Fabrica.

Since August 2011, Mollison has been work­ing as a cre­ative edi­tor on Colors Magazine with Patrick Waterhouse. In 2009 he won the Royal Photographic Society’s Vic Odden Award, for notable achieve­ment in the art of pho­tog­ra­phy by a British pho­tog­ra­pher aged 35 or under.

His work has been widely pub­lished through­out the world includ­ing by Colors, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian mag­a­zine, The Paris Review, GQ, New York Magazine and Le Monde.

His book Playground was pub­lished in April 2015 by Aperture Foundation — a series of com­pos­ites of moments that hap­pened dur­ing a sin­gle break time, a kind of time-​lapse photography.

His third book, The Disciples was pub­lished in 2008 – panoramic for­mat por­traits of music fans pho­tographed before and after concerts.

His fourth book Where Children Sleep was pub­lished in November 2010 — sto­ries of diverse chil­dren around the world, told through por­traits and pic­tures of their bedroom.

In 2007 he pub­lished The Memory of Pablo Escobar – the extra­or­di­nary story of “the rich­est and most vio­lent gang­ster in his­tory”, told by hun­dreds of pho­tographs gath­ered by James Mollison.

It was the follow-​up to his work on the great apes – widely seen as an exhi­bi­tion includ­ing at the Natural History Museum, London, and in the book James & Other Apes (Chris Boot, 2004).