The Echo of Our Voices is the fourth chapter of The Day May Break, a global series featuring first humans and animals, and now just humans, impacted by climate change and environmental degradation and destruction.

The photographs feature 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 families are forced to move their homes up to several times a year, moving to where there is available agricultural work, to wherever there has been sufficient rainfall to enable crops to grow.

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.

"In Brandt's photographs, the families tell tales of sadness, of lives suspended in temporary time.  The images speak of absence, yet also of love.  Despite shifting meanings of pain, disquiet, and the unknown, Brandt reveals that love is the thread of their survival.

Each photograph contains a rebellious cry.  The images tell us, with solemn dignity: Do not avert your eyes."

 – Samar Yazbek, Author of Where the Wind Calls Home and Planet of Clay.  From the Foreword to The Echo of Our Voices.

SINK / RISE is the third chapter of The Day May Break, an ongoing global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction.

This third chapter 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.

Everything is shot in-camera underwater.

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.

Victims of habitat destruction and wildlife trafficking, the animals are rescues that can never be re-released back into the wild.. Their portraits were taken in the same frame and indeed convey a sense of connectedness through a shared fate. Fog comes wafting through the frame: it is the unifying visual, symbolic of the natural world rapidly fading from view, an echo of the smoke from wildfires, intensified by climate change, devastating so much of the planet. But despite their loss, these people and animals are survivors, pioneers entering a new phase our world has reached. In The Day May Break, Chapter Two they share their powerful stories.

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.

Pub. Date: 2019

128 pages, 84 photos,  15" x 13" (38 x 33 cm)
Thames & Hudson, 2019

Essays by Nick Brandt

Moving into color photography for the first time, this monograph of new work from photographer Nick Brandt is both a technical tour de force of contemporary image making and an ambitiously scaled project that uses constructed sets of a scale typically seen in major film productions.

Each image is a combination of two photographs taken weeks apart, almost all from the exact same camera position. The starting point of each composition is always the animal photographed in its native savannah landscape. Brandt then designs and builds sets in the precise location of the original photograph depicting the human developments, such as gas stations, highway and bridge construction sites, and bus stations, that are invading the East African landscape. A second sequence is then photographed with the completed set, populated by a large cast of people drawn from local communities and beyond.

The final images are powerful composites of the two source photographs, which presents the wild animals and the people as equal victims of the environmental—both now aliens in their once-natural, once-native habitat.

Including an introductory essay by Nick Brandt and a descriptive behind-the- scenes section, this new book is a must-have publication for all fans of Brandt’s work.

Pub. Date: 2013

120 pages, 52 quadtone plates, 15" x 13" (38 x 33 cm)
Abrams Books, 2013
Printed in the U.S. at Meridian, R.I.

Essays by Nick Brandt

Pub. Date: 2012 

192 pages,  90 plates 

(54 photos from A Shadow Falls, 36 Photos from On This Earth)

D.A.P. / Big Life Editions, 2014
Linen cover with tipped-on image, 13.5" x 15.3" (34.3 x 39 cm) and custom-made hard acetate jacket.