reinforced my belief that I could go and
do something like that under extreme
conditions. We had done a lot of home-
work. If you look at the pictures from
South Sudan, it’s a very dangerous place,
and a lot of the photography taken there
is very flat. The photographers were all
too low. They had no point of raised
elevation. Without that elevation, you
can’t capture the depth of these Dinka
cattle camps. I think a mistake a lot of
photographers make is that they don’t
do enough research before they go and
shoot somewhere. Because I did with
my team beforehand, I took a ladder all
the way up through a civil war—kind of
a strange thing to be doing—because I
knew I needed to be 10 feet high. I shot
that with a 58mm lens.
OP: Do you tend to work with fixed
lenses rather than zooms?
DY: The NIKKOR 58mm is my go-to
lens. I also work a lot with a 35mm and
a 105mm. I never use zooms. You’re
not going to see a difference in a pic-
ture printed A4 size, but when you make
prints the size of a tennis court, you will.
One of my pictures is on the side of a
building in Oslo. If that had been taken
with a zoom, you’d know. We do pigment
prints up to 60 inches on Hahnemühle
[paper] at BowHaus in Los Angeles and
up to 80 inches wide in London.OP: You’ve said in the past that
the three most important words
for an assignment photographer
are “research,” “relentless” and
“relevance.”
DY: Of those three Rs, I think the most
important is research. Most of our work is
done not with a camera-in-hand. I shoot
about 90 days a year. A lot of time is used
by my team to make sure I’m workingLeft: Mankind.
Yirol, South Sudan, 2014.
Below: Heaven Can Wait.
Amboseli, Kenya, 2014.
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