Capturing Bali’s Many Faces, Zissou Documents The Sacred And The Mundane Of A Fragile Island

At first read, the story has a familiar feel: a painter-turned-successful web designer in his mid-thirties senses it’s time for something different, far away from the corporate world. He follows his instinct to Bali, Indonesia, with minimal possessions and even fewer plans. That’s where the story of the mononymous photographer Zissou breaks with the standard.

The pivot point is an encounter with John Hardy, co-founder of the revolutionary Green School: a holistic, sustainability-focused education approach set in an open-air bamboo campus in the Balinese jungle. Enchanted by its philosophy, he signs up to volunteer and is soon asked to help Hardy write a TED Talk speech, whose success goes on to launch an enduring friendship.

As he settles into the steamy tropical climes of his adopted home, ten months of walking around to scout out a plot of land to call his own eventually sees Zissou get a blessing to rent a plot of land on the jungle’s edge, on a precipice overlooking the Ayung River near Ubud. Amidst a garden full of pineapples, turmeric, ginger, chilies, and lemongrass, he applies the architecture techniques he learned at the Green School to build a pair of open-air bamboo huts, with support from craftspeople in his village. Being exposed to the elements prompts him to scale back his possessions to the bare essentials. There’s no point in having extraneous possessions here; everything rots in the jungle.

Having grown up in and around the dark room and meticulous family albums of his father, a war photographer and journalist who rubbed shoulders with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Jacques-Henri Lartigue, whose brother he is named after, Zissou picks up a camera for the first time since childhood and begins to bring it everywhere he goes, documenting his two favorite subjects: people, and people in nature. It all evolves from there.