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Thursday 6 February

Nick Brandt: The Photographer Who Stirs Our Souls

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Nick Brandt, born in 1964 in London, is not just a wildlife photographer snapping zebras with a telephoto lens from his air-conditioned 4×4. He is the Théodore Géricault of our time, immortalizing not the Raft of the Medusa but the ultimate shipwreck of our natural world. And if you think this comparison is excessive, it’s because you’ve failed to grasp the power of his work.

Let’s start with his revolutionary approach to wildlife photography. While most wildlife photographers hide behind their massive telephoto lenses to capture spectacular action scenes, Brandt does the exact opposite. He approaches his subjects with a simple Pentax 67II and fixed lenses, as if he were taking studio portraits.

His technique flirts with madness. Imagine for a moment what it means to photograph a lion just a few meters away with a medium-format camera that sounds like a jackhammer with every click. This isn’t photography—it’s aesthetic Russian roulette. But it is precisely this physical proximity that gives his images their metaphysical power. When you look at his black-and-white portraits of elephants, you don’t just see pachyderms—you confront beings with consciousness, staring back at you from the brink of extinction.

The way he uses black and white is masterful. It’s not an easy aesthetic choice to appear “artistic” like so many mediocre photographers. No, his black and white is as sharp as a razor blade. It strips his images of any chromatic distraction to force us to see the essential: the pure presence of these creatures, their intrinsic dignity, their absolute vulnerability. It’s what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the face of the other”—a presence that imposes an inescapable ethical responsibility on us.

In his series On This Earth, Brandt shows us animals that already seem like ghosts. Zebras emerge from the mist like specters of a vanishing past. Giraffes stand against the sky like hieroglyphs of a language we are forgetting. Each image is a visual elegy, a memento mori for the Anthropocene. This approach recalls the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher on industrial structures, but instead of documenting the remnants of the industrial revolution, Brandt catalogs the victims of that same revolution.

But it is with This Empty World that his work reaches a truly prophetic dimension. This series is a punch to the gut of our collective conscience. Brandt constructs gigantic sets in the middle of the savannah—gas stations, construction sites, roads—creating visual collisions between the natural world and our industrial civilization that make Blade Runner look like a romantic comedy. The technical achievement is mind-blowing: he sets up cameras with motion sensors, waits months for the animals to get used to the structures, then completes the sets and adds humans. The result is of unprecedented symbolic violence.

Take the image of an elephant lost in a nighttime construction site. Workers, absorbed in their phones, completely ignore its majestic presence. The artificial light creates a nightmarish atmosphere reminiscent of Hopper’s paintings, but instead of urban loneliness, it’s environmental alienation that’s depicted. The elephant becomes a monumental memento mori, a reminder of what we are losing in our frantic race for “progress”.

This series echoes anthropologist Anna Tsing’s theories on what she calls “the ruins of capitalism”. But Brandt goes further: he doesn’t just document these ruins—he creates visual allegories that force us to confront our own barbarism. Each image is an accusation, a prophecy, a lamentation.

The series Across The Ravaged Land takes this reflection on our capacity for destruction even further. The images of rangers holding the tusks of poached elephants are tragically powerful, reminiscent of Renaissance pietàs. But instead of Mary holding the body of Christ, we see men holding the remains of creatures slaughtered to satisfy human vanity. It’s what philosopher Theodor Adorno might call a “dialectical image”—one that reveals the fundamental contradictions of our civilization.

The portraits of animals petrified by Lake Natron may be the most disturbing images in this series. These calcified creatures, frozen in poses reminiscent of the casts from Pompeii, become monuments to our collective indifference. It’s Géricault meets Joel-Peter Witkin—the sublime and horror fused into a single image.

With The Day May Break, Brandt elevates his art to a new level of conceptual complexity. This series of portraits of humans and animals in mist, all victims of climate change, is unbearably beautiful. The artificial fog enveloping his subjects is not just an aesthetic effect—it’s a visual metaphor for our collective blindness. Each image is constructed like a Renaissance painting, with meticulous attention to composition and light, but the message is resolutely contemporary.

The portraits are accompanied by heartbreaking testimonies: farmers who have lost their lands to drought, families displaced by catastrophic floods, animals saved at the brink of extinction. It’s what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible”—a redistribution of what is visible and sayable in our society. Brandt gives a voice and a face to those usually invisible in the discourse on climate change.

His latest series, SINK / RISE, photographed in Fiji, may be his boldest creation yet. These underwater portraits of islanders threatened by rising seas are chillingly ironic. The subjects are photographed performing daily activities—sitting on sofas, standing on chairs—but underwater. It’s magical realism meets environmental documentary. The images recall Bill Viola’s installations, but instead of exploring spirituality, they confront the brutal reality of climate change.

What is particularly striking in The Echo of Our Voices, his most recent series, is how he links the climate crisis to the refugee crisis. By photographing Syrian families in Jordan, the second most water-scarce country in the world, Brandt shows how environmental and human catastrophes are inextricably linked. The portraits of families perched on stacks of crates rising toward the sky are extraordinarily symbolic—a verticality suggesting both precariousness and resilience.

Brandt’s technique is as rigorous as his vision is relentless. For This Empty World, he developed a complex process involving elaborate lighting systems, motion sensors, and monumental sets. Each image is the result of months of preparation and waiting. This monastic patience recalls the great photographers of the 19th century, but serves a very contemporary urgency.

Some critics reduce his work to “conservation photography” or “environmental photojournalism”. What nonsense! Brandt is a conceptual artist using photography as a medium to create a new visual mythology of the Anthropocene. His images are not documents—they are visions, prophecies, visual manifestos.

The way he uses artificial lighting in his nighttime scenes is particularly remarkable. These harsh lights, reminiscent of Georges de La Tour’s paintings, create an atmosphere of apocalyptic theater. The projected shadows are as important as the subjects themselves, creating a complex visual choreography evoking Piranesi’s engravings.

What sets Brandt apart from so many contemporary photographers is his absolute refusal of cynicism. In an art world where irony has become the default pose, he dares to be utterly sincere. His anger is real, his compassion is real, his despair is real. It’s what philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called engagement—an art that doesn’t just reflect the world but seeks to change it.

His work with the Big Life Foundation, which he co-founded in 2010, shows that he doesn’t just document destruction—he actively fights to combat it. This fusion of art and activism recalls the avant-gardes of the early 20th century but with an even greater urgency. For unlike the Surrealists who sought to change life, Brandt literally fights to preserve it.

The way he deals with temporality in his images is fascinating. His photographs seem to exist simultaneously in multiple temporalities: they document the present, prophesy the future, and mourn the past. It’s what art historian Aby Warburg called survivance—the way certain images carry within them the memory of older forms.

Technically, his transition from film to digital photography for This Empty World and subsequent series hasn’t diminished the power of his vision. If his early black-and-white images evoked 19th-century photography, his recent color works create their own visual language. The saturated colors of his nighttime scenes are as artificial as our current relationship with nature.

For those who still think photography is just a simple document, Brandt’s work is a wake-up slap. His images are complex constructions requiring as much planning and thought as a history painting. The difference is that the history he paints is unfolding before our eyes, and we are all complicit in it.

His use of staging does not diminish the truth of his work. On the contrary, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, sometimes fiction is the best way to access truth. Brandt’s constructed scenes reveal a deeper truth than any traditional documentary.

Nick Brandt’s work is a brutal reminder of our collective mortality. His images force us to confront what we usually prefer to ignore: our responsibility in the destruction of the natural world. If you don’t understand the importance of his work, you are part of the problem. His art is not here to comfort or entertain us—it is here to shake us out of our consumerist stupor before it’s too late.

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