NICK BRANDT
Nick Brandt - The Cave, Jordan 2024, The Echo of our Voices (Chapter Four of TDMB)- Archival pigment print. Courtesy WILLAS contemporary
The Day May Break
BY NICK BRANDT
The Day May Break is an ongoing global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by climate change, environmental degradation and destruction.
With this series, Nick Brandt has created a profoundly original body of work, one that represents an entirely new approach to climate-conscious photography, and one that gives us a vital means of considering what we all stand to lose. The environmental threat to life on this planet – both human and animal – is realized to devastating effect in these powerful yet tender portraits.
Chapter One was photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in 2020, Chapter Two in Bolivia in 2022. The people in the photos have all been badly affected by climate change, from extreme droughts to floods that destroyed their homes and livelihoods. The photographs were taken at several sanctuaries and conservancies. The animals are almost all long-term rescues, victims of everything from habitat destruction to wildlife trafficking. These animals can never be released back into the wild. As a result, they are almost all habituated to humans, and so it was safe for human strangers to be close to them, photographed in the same frame at the same time.
SINK / RISE (2023), Chapter Three of The Day May Break, focuses on South Pacific Islanders impacted by rising oceans from climate change. The local people in these photos, photographed underwater in the ocean off the coast of the Fijian islands, are representatives of the many people whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades as the water rises.
The Echo of Our Voices (2024), the fourth chapter of The Day May Break, features rural families, who fled the war in Syria, now living in Jordan.
Jordan is considered the second most water-scarce country in the world. Living lives of continuous displacement due to climate change, the Syrians are forced to move their homes up to several times a year, moving to where there has been sufficient rainfall for crops to grow, and with that, temporary employment.
This chapter is very different to the previous chapters, both visually and emotionally: a show of connection and strength in the face of adversity, that when all else is lost you still have each other.
The stacks of boxes that the families sit and stand together on aim skyward - a verticality implying a strength or defiance - and provide pedestals for those that in our society are typically unseen and unheard.
The Day May Break… and the world may shatter.
Or perhaps…the day may break…and some kind of dawn still come.
Humanity’s choice. Our choice.
Spread across the planet, there is a common link between the people and countries here:
They all are among those that are the least responsible for climate breakdown. Their global carbon emissions are and have been tiny compared to industrial nations. Yet, like so many other poorer countries in the world, they are disproportionately harmed by its effects. The grim irony is that many people in these countries are the most vulnerable to the calamitous consequences of the industrial world’s ways.
However, in spite of their loss, all these people and animals are survivors. And therein still lies possibility.
In all these photos, the subjects of the photographs seem to say: Do not turn your eyes away from us.
Note: In all cases, the photographs are all in camera, without any compositing.
Nick Brandt - Halima, Abdul and Frida, Kenya 2020. Courtesy WILLAS contemporary.
CHAPTER ONE / 2021
"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
Nick Brandt - Ruth and Zosa, Bolivia, 2022, Archival Pigment Print, Courtesy WILLAS contemporary
CHAPTER TWO / 2022
"These are cautionary tales of tenuous survival, and while the pictures themselves are fascinating because of how strange it is to think of the animals and people calmly sharing personal space, it should not be happening and it feels both magical and ominous, hopeful and unsettling.
At heart, the question this series poses is whether the day will break like sunrise, or like glass. For as gorgeous, rich and operatic as the images are, this is not an Edenic vision of coexistence, it’s an urgent plea for taking action."
— Shana Nys Dambrot, Art Critic, L.A. Weekly
Nick Brandt - Serafina at Table, Fiji 2023, Archival Pigment Print, Courtesy WILLAS contemporary
SINK / RISE CHAPTER THREE / 2023
Although they are several meters below the surface, the subjects of Brandt’s mesmerizing photographs do not float or swim. Incredibly, they sit on sofas, stand on chairs, use seesaws, and pose in ways they might on land. The effect is otherworldly, as though the familiar laws of physics have stalled in this strange, liminal zone between land and sea.
Sit with these photographs and the others in the series, and the subjects’ expressions will change like water. Stoicism becomes resignation. Frustration becomes resolve. In their pensive faces, we can read tenderness, grief, and perseverance. Intimate and spare as these portraits are, the effect is expansive.
Despite the surreal, semi-theatrical settings in which these portraits occur, Brandt’s images are direct, uncluttered, and free from distractions. This combination of ambitious fantasy and exquisite restraint is a signature of Brandt’s work rarely seen elsewhere.
The photographs comprising SINK / RISE are remarkable in their ability to be simultaneously approachable and enigmatic, to be political and inclusive. They invite us to linger, to look harder, and to go deeper. With every return, there is something new to discover— within the images or within us.
With the portraits in SINK / RISE, Brandt gives us a vital means of considering what we all stand to lose."
— Zoe Lescaze, Author and Art Writer, from the Foreword to SINK / RISE
Nick Brandt - Zaina, Laila and Haroub, Jordan 2024, Archival Pigment Print, Courtesy WILLAS contemporary
THE ECHO OF OUR VOICES CHAPTER FOUR / 2024
“Brandt strikes a flawless balance between harsh and soft elements, in this case the delicate union of the roughness of the desert, and the refugees’ stories and the warmth of family. The refugees come alive through Brandt’s photographs; the physical connection emanate affection, and in the eyes of the children are crystal-clear dreams.
In a world that so frequently dehumanizes Arabs, especially Arab woman who fall victim to stereotypical depictions of oppressed voiceless beings, Brandt has given these women a platform to reclaim their power.”
— Alaa Elassar, CNN
This Chapter was partially funded by Gallerie d’Italia Museum, Turin
f-stop magazine
Nick Brandt - The Echo of our Voices
Text by Cary Benbow
“For over a decade, photographer Nick Brandt has distinguished himself by crafting powerful visual narratives that explore the complex relationship between humanity and the natural world. His latest project, The Echo of Our Voices…turns his empathetic lens towards the often-unseen plight of displaced Syrian refugees in Jordan.
Previous exhibitions with WILLAS contemporary
Inherit The Dust by Nick Brandt
Since 2001, Nick Brandt has documented the vanishing natural world and animals of East Africa. Three years after the conclusion of the African trilogy, ‘On This Earth, A Shadow Falls, Across the Ravaged Land’, Brandt has returned to reveal the environmental damage striking the East-African territory.
The photographs of life-size panels of animals in locations where they used to roam, but as a result of human impact on the environment, no longer do, carry an important message.
It is a general assumption that the destruction in Africa has to do with poaching and feeding the unstoppable demand for animal parts from the Far East. However, the problem is more complicated as it is also linked to the world’s overpopulation and the limited amount of space and resources.
The monograph Inherit the Dust, published by Edwynn Houk Editions was released in March 2016. The book’s release coincided with the roll out of accompanying exhibitions featuring large-scale prints in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Stockholm, and London, among other cities.
International press about Inherit The Dust
“The wasted lands in Inherit The Dust were once golden savannah, sprinkled with acacia trees, where elephants, big cats and rhinos roamed.
These now dystopian landscapes - as Nick Brandt’s unvarnished, harrowing but stunning work reveals - brings us face to face with a crisis, both social and environmental, demanding the renewal of humanity itself.”
- Kathryn Bigelow, Film Director, The Hurt Locker
“Nick Brandt’s astonishing panoramas are a jolting combination of beauty, decay, and admonishment ... an eloquent and complex ‘J’accuse’ ... A collision between Bruegel and an apocalypse in waiting.”
— Vicki Goldberg, art critic, author
“Nick Brandt’s latest work is both gorgeous and disturbing… Brandt has deftly turned his art into a call for action.”
— Jack Crager, American Photo, 10 Best New Photobooks Spring 2016
“Brandt’s new collection is his most powerful and heart-wrenching to date.”
— The Daily Beast
“Nick Brandt’s epic panoramas serve as a heart breaking epitaph to a paradise lost.”
— Sunday Times UK
“An evocative portrait of change and loss”.
— Wall Street Journal
Big Life Foundation
In 2010, Brandt co-founded Big Life Foundation, a non-profit organization protecting 2 million acres of ecosystem in East Africa. With nearly 300 rangers, poaching has been dramatically reduced in the region, and is one of the few conservation success stories currently in East Africa.
For more information: www.biglife.org
The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Fotografiska in Stockholm.
For more information: www.fotografiska.eu