Nick Brandt

Through his widely acclaimed work, English photographer Nick Brandt (1964) addresses pressing environmental issues, consistently highlighting mankind’s impact upon the natural world. His work is truly a fusion of artistry and activism, and he is best known for capturing the majestic landscapes of Africa as well as intimate portraits of its wildlife. Sink / Rise is the third chapter of The Day May Break, an ongoing global series portraying ecological degradation and destruction. This chapter adopts a slightly different approach than its predecessors: taking humans, rather than animals or landscapes, as his subjects. Sink / Rise focuses on South Pacific Islanders impacted by rising oceans from climate change. The people in these photos, photographed underwater in the ocean off the coast of the Fijian islands, are local representatives of the many people whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades as the water rises. In Brandt’s images, the Islanders sit down at tables, stand on chairs and embrace—all the while, their pinched expressions reveal the desperation of their asphyxiating condition.

Some of Nick Brandt’s subjects are humans, some are animals, but they all are creatures of equal and obvious personhood. The overwhelming sense in the photographer’s ongoing global series The Day May Break is that they are figuring out how to live in a new world. Each has arrived at the shoot at Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia through their own cascade of tragedy. Both extreme droughts and floods have destroyed people’s homes and livelihoods.
Some of Nick Brandt’s subjects are humans, some are animals, but they all are creatures of equal and obvious personhood. The overwhelming sense in the photographer’s ongoing global series The Day May Break is that they are figuring out how to live in a new world. Each has arrived at the shoot at Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia through their own cascade of misfortune. Both extreme droughts and floods have destroyed people’s homes and livelihoods.
Nick Brandt (born 1964) studied film and painting at St Martin’s College in London. He turned to photography in 2001 with his trilogy On This Earth, A Shadow Falls and Across the Ravaged Land. His more recent books are Inherit the Dust (2016), This Empty World (2019) and The Day May Break (2021). He lives in Southern California.

Photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, The Day May Break is the first part of a global series by acclaimed photographer Nick Brandt, portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction.
The people in these photographs were all affected by climate change, displaced by cyclones and years-long droughts. Photographed at five sanctuaries, the animals were rescues that can never be rewilded. As a result, it was safe for human strangers to be close to them, photographed so close to them, within the same frame. The fog on location is the unifying visual motif, conveying the sense of an ever-increasing limbo, a once-recognizable world now fading from view. However, despite their respective losses, these people and animals have survived, and therein lies possibility and hope.
Nick Brandt (born 1964) studied film and painting at St Martin’s College in London. He turned to photography in 2001 with his trilogy On This Earth, A Shadow Falls and Across the Ravaged Land. His more recent books are Inherit the Dust (2016) and This Empty World (2019). He lives in Southern California.

"Nick Brandt is an artist and witness who seizes bleak and desperate fates, and by some mystery and alchemy, transmutes these into a gesture of poignant and painful beauty. It has been an eon, and then some, since I experienced contemporary photographs of people of African roots created by a person of Euro-American origin, that were this tender, human and gorgeous." –Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust and The Dragonfly Sea, from the foreword to The Day May Break.

"A landmark body of work by one of photography’s great environmental champions. Showing how deeply our fates are intertwined, Brandt portrays people and animals together, causing us to reflect on the real-life consequences of climate change. Channeling his outrage into quiet determination, the result is a portrait of us all, at a critical moment in the Anthropocene.” –Phillip Prodger, curator, author, photography historian, former Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

"The environmental threat to life on this planet—both human and animal—is realized by Nick Brandt in The Day May Break to devastating effect in these powerful yet tender portraits. Art of this caliber is in a unique position to challenge and engage audiences in environmental conversation.” –Mary Robinson, Former President of Ireland and United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Climate Change, Chair of The Elders.

Three years after the completion of his trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls Across the Ravaged Land, Nick Brandt returned to East Africa to photograph the escalating changes to the continent's natural world and its animals. In each location, Brandt erected a life-size panel of one of his portrait photographs—showing groups of elephants, rhinos, giraffes, lions, cheetahs and zebras—placing the displaced animals on sites of explosive urban development, new factories, wastelands and quarries. The contemporary figures within the photographs seem oblivious to the presence of the panels and the animals represented in them, who are now no more than ghosts in the landscape. Inherit the Dust includes this new body of panoramic photographs along with original portraits of the animals used in the panoramas, the unique emotional animal portraiture for which Brandt is recognized. There are also two essays by the artist: a text about the crisis facing the conservation of the natural world in East Africa, and behind-the-scenes descriptions of Brandt’s elaborate production process, with accompanying documentary photographs.

Nick Brandt (born 1964) photographs exclusively in Africa. Born in Britain and currently based in Southern California, Brandt cofounded Big Life Foundation in 2010, which helps protect the endangered wildlife inhabiting a large area of East Africa.

In 2001, Nick Brandt embarked on an ambitious photographic project, a trilogy of books memorializing the fast-disappearing natural grandeur of East Africa. Focusing on some of the world's last great populations of large mammals--elephants, giraffes, lions, gorillas and their kin--he created two of the twenty-first century's most popular photographic books: the instant bestsellers On This Earth (2005) and A Shadow Falls (2009). Portraying East Africa's animals with a solemnity and empathy usually reserved for human subjects, Brandt's photographs "tell us, in a way that is beyond words, that we do not own this planet, and are not the only beings living on it who matter," as philosopher Peter Singer writes in an essay in this new volume. On This Earth, A Shadow Falls collects the most memorable images from Brandt's first two books in a handsome linen-bound edition, printed in quadratone at Meridian in the U.S. A bestseller since its release in 2012, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls includes essays by Peter Singer, renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, author Alice Sebold and photography critic Vicki Goldberg. With Africa's natural resources being fast wiped out, this volume stands all the more movingly as a last testament and elegy to a disappearing world.

Nick Brandt (born 1966) photographs exclusively in Africa, using medium-format black-and-white film without telephoto or zoom lenses. Born in Britain and currently based in Southern California, Brandt cofounded Big Life Foundation in September 2010, which helps protect the endangered wildlife inhabiting a large area of East Africa.