Working in colour for the first time, Nick Brandt’s latest project uses complex composition and dramatically cinematic staging to highlight environmental degradation in the world and its effect on both animal and human life

This Empty World, Nick Brandt’s new monograph, features a series of dramatically staged photographs that bring together and reveal the animals and people of East Africa as the victims of environmental degradation in an emotionally powerful, cinematic way.

Moving into colour photography for the first time, the work is both a technical tour-de-force and a massively ambitious project in which the sets are constructed on a scale typically seen in major film production. Each panoramic image is a combination of two moments in time, almost all of them captured weeks apart from the exact same camera position.

Brandt first builds and lights a partial set, then waits for the animals that inhabit the region to enter the frame. Once captured on camera, the full set is built with the camera remaining fixed in place. The sets include bridge and highway construction sites, a petrol station, a bus station and even a dead forest. Completing the scene with a huge cast drawn from local communities, Brandt then photographs the second sequence. The final large scale prints are a composite of the two intricately plotted elements.

Viewed as a whole, the images vividly illustrate a world in which, overwhelmed by runaway human development, there is no longer space for animals to survive, and beg the question: what kind of world will we live in when stripped of its natural wonders.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (b.1964) is an English-born, US-based photographer whose themes always relate to the disappearing natural world. He is the co-founder of the Big Life Foundation, in Kenya, where all of these photographs were shot.

Three years after the conclusion of his trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls, Across the Ravaged Land, Nick Brandt returns to East Africa to photograph the escalating changes to the continent’s natural world.

In a series of epic panoramas, Brandt records the impact of man in places where animals used to roam, but no longer do. In each location, Brandt erects a life size panel of one of his animal portrait photographs, setting the panels within a world of explosive urban development, factories, wasteland and quarries.

The people within the photographs are oblivious to the presence of the panels and the animals featured in them, who are now no more than ghosts in the landscape. Some of the animals in the panels appear to be looking out at these destroyed landscapes with sadness, as if lamenting the loss of the world they once inhabited. By the end, we see that it is not just the animals who are the victims in this out of control world, but also the humans.

Inherit the Dust also includes plates of the original portraits of the animals that are featured in the life-size panels, 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.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (b.1964) is an English-born, US-based photographer whose themes always relate to the disappearing natural world. He is the co-founder of the Big Life Foundation, in Kenya, where all of these photographs were shot.

Portraits of Survival and Hope

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 all 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. Victims of habitat destruction and wildlife trafficking, the animals are rescues that can never be released to the wild. People and animals were photographed in the same frame and indeed convey a sense of connectedness through a shared fate. Fog is the unifying visual, symbolic of the natural world rapidly fading from view; and an echo of the smoke from wildfires, intensified by climate change, devastating so much of the planet. But in spite of their loss, these people and animals are survivors, pioneers entering the new phase our world has reached. In The Day May Break they share their powerful stories.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (*1964, London) studied painting and film at St. Martin’s School of Art, London. In 1992 he moved to California, where he still lives today. Since 2001, he has documented the destructive impact that humankind is having on the natural world and, as a result, on humans themselves. Chapter One of his seminal series The Day May Break featured photographs taken in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020. Chapter Two, shot in Bolivia in 2022, is the first time in his 20-year career that Brandt has made work outside of Africa.

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 all 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. Victims of habitat destruction and wildlife trafficking, the animals are rescues that can never be released to the wild. People and animals were photographed in the same frame and indeed convey a sense of connectedness through a shared fate. Fog is the unifying visual, symbolic of the natural world rapidly fading from view; and an echo of the smoke from wildfires, intensified by climate change, devastating so much of the planet. But in spite of their loss, these people and animals are survivors, pioneers entering the new phase our world has reached. In The Day May Break they share their powerful stories.

This set includes the volumes The Day May Break and The Day May Break – Chapter Two.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (b.1964) is an English-born, US-based photographer whose themes always relate to the disappearing natural world. He is the co-founder of the Big Life Foundation, in Kenya, where all of these photographs were shot.

The Day May Break, photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, is the first part of a global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction. The people in the photos 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 re-wilded. 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, as we increasingly find ourselves in a kind of limbo, a once-recognizable world now fading from view. However, in spite of their loss, these people and animals are the survivors. And therein lies possibility and hope.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (b.1964) is an English-born, US-based photographer whose themes always relate to the disappearing natural world. He is the co-founder of the Big Life Foundation, in Kenya, where all of these photographs were shot.

Across the Ravaged Land is the third and final volume in Nick Brandt’s trilogy of books documenting the disappearing animals of eastern Africa. The book offers a darker vision of this world, still filled with a stunning beauty but now tragically tainted and fast disappearing at the hands of man.

In addition to a range of starkly powerful animal portraits, Brandt introduces some new themes, as humans make an appearance for the first time. He also contributes two essays summing up his photographic odyssey, which has taken more than a decade of intensive work to complete.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (b.1964) is an English-born, US-based photographer whose themes always relate to the disappearing natural world. He is the co-founder of the Big Life Foundation, in Kenya, where all of these photographs were shot.

Across the Ravaged Land is the third and final volume in Nick Brandt’s trilogy of books documenting the disappearing animals of eastern Africa. The book offers a darker vision of this world, still filled with a stunning beauty but now tragically tainted and fast disappearing at the hands of man.

In addition to a range of starkly powerful animal portraits, Brandt introduces some new themes, as humans make an appearance for the first time. He also contributes two essays summing up his photographic odyssey, which has taken more than a decade of intensive work to complete.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (b.1964) is an English-born, US-based photographer whose themes always relate to the disappearing natural world. He is the co-founder of the Big Life Foundation, in Kenya, where all of these photographs were shot.

In 2001, Nick Brandt embarked on an ambitious photographic project, a trilogy of books memorialising the vanishing natural grander of East Africa. Focusing on of the world's last great populations of large mammals; elephants, giraffes, lions, gorillas and their kin, he created two of the new century's most influential photographic books: On This Earth (2005) and A Shadow Falls (2009). His iconic portraits of these majestic animals express and empathy usually reserved for human subjects. The magisterial On This Earth, A Shadow Falls collects the most memorable images from Brandt's first two books, along with their accompanying essays. A testament to the bookmaker's craft, it is the first volume on Brandt's work to capture the superb quality of his remarkable, large format prints, which are notable for their velvet blacks and tonal subtleties. Brandt is currently completing the final volume of his trilogy documenting the fate of the great animals of East Africa.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (b.1964) is an English-born, US-based photographer whose themes always relate to the disappearing natural world. He is the co-founder of the Big Life Foundation, in Kenya, where all of these photographs were shot.

In 2001, Nick Brandt embarked on an ambitious photographic project, a trilogy of books memorialising the vanishing natural grander of East Africa. Focusing on of the world's last great populations of large mammals; elephants, giraffes, lions, gorillas and their kin, he created two of the new century's most influential photographic books: On This Earth (2005) and A Shadow Falls (2009). His iconic portraits of these majestic animals express and empathy usually reserved for human subjects. The magisterial On This Earth, A Shadow Falls collects the most memorable images from Brandt's first two books, along with their accompanying essays. A testament to the bookmaker's craft, it is the first volume on Brandt's work to capture the superb quality of his remarkable, large format prints, which are notable for their velvet blacks and tonal subtleties. Brandt is currently completing the final volume of his trilogy documenting the fate of the great animals of East Africa.

About the Author:

Nick Brandt (b.1964) is an English-born, US-based photographer whose themes always relate to the disappearing natural world. He is the co-founder of the Big Life Foundation, in Kenya, where all of these photographs were shot.

In A Shadow Falls, which features fifty-eight recent images in stunning, oversized tritone plates, Nick Brandt continues his ambitious and ongoing photographic project to memorialize the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa. Brandt’s wide-screen panoramas of animals and landscapes capture an epic vision of Africa that has not been seen before. His iconic portraits of its majestic animals are filled with an empathy usually reserved for human subjects.

From the opening images in A Shadow Falls, of a verdant world filled with multitudes of animals, to the closing images of small bands of creatures moving across a parched, dusty earth, Brandt portrays a mythic Africa struggling against tragic forces. In years to come, we will look back at these powerful photographs and wonder why humanity did not do more to preserve this rare corner of earthly paradise.

About the author:

Nick Brandt's first book, On This Earth, is one of the most popular photography books of this decade.