Nick Brandt

144 pages, 12.75” x 12”
Published by Hatje Cantz
Essays by Nick Brandt and Daniel Sherrell

$60 / €58 / £52

Signed Copies available at :

The Day May Break is an ongoing global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction.

Chapter Two was photographed 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 La Senda Verde Animal Sanctuary where 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 mostly habituated to humans, and so it was safe for strangers to be close to them, photographed in the same frame at the same time.

The fog is symbolic of a natural world now rapidly fading from view. Created by fog machines on location, it is also an echo of the smoke from wildfires, intensified by climate change, devastating so much of the planet.

However, in spite of their loss, these people and animals are the survivors. And therein lies hope and possibility.

“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 Dymbrot, L.A. Weekly

BOOK

168 pages, 90 plates, 33cm x 31cm / 13” x 12.2”
Published by Hatje Cantz

Essays by Yvonne Adhiambo Uwuor, Percival Everett and Nick Brandt

$65 / €54

SELECTED SCHEDULED EXHIBITIONS

» FOR A FULL LIST & MORE INFORMATON, VIEW THE EXHIBITIONS PAGE

September 2021

Fahey/Klein Gallery, LOS ANGELES

Atlas Gallery, LONDON

Custot Gallery, DUBAI

Photo London, Atlas Gallery, September 9-12, 2021

October 2021

Willas Contemporary, OSLO

November 2021

Paris Photo, Polka Galerie, November 11-14, 2021

December 2021

Source Photographica, MELBOURNE

January 2022

Polka Galerie, PARIS

May 2022

Festival La Gacilly Baden Photo, BADEN, AUSTRIA

October 2022

Edwynn Houk Gallery, NEW YORK

(includes work from Chapter Two, being released in September).

October 2022
Shanghai Center for Photography, SHANGHAI
(includes work from Chapter Two, being released in September).

"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, from the Foreword to The Day May Break, Author of Dust and The Dragonfly Sea.

"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 calibre 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.

"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, Photo historian, former Head of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London.