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.

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.

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 several sets are constructed on a scale typically only seen in 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. Photographed on unprotected, inhabited Maasai community land, after the sets were removed and their elements recycled, no evidence of the images now remains in the landscape.