Nick Brandt photographed The Day May Break in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, bringing together people displaced by climate-related cyclones and prolonged droughts with animals living in five sanctuaries. The animals, all rescues unable to return to the wild, could safely occupy the same frame as unfamiliar human subjects. Published by Hatje Cantz in 2021, the book forms the opening part of a global series on lives altered by environmental destruction.

Brandt treats these encounters as collective portraits rather than conventional wildlife pictures or straightforward records of disaster. Human and animal figures stand close without being presented as equivalents: each retains an individual presence, while their shared circumstances suggest how environmental damage crosses the boundaries by which societies usually separate species and experience. The photographs turn displacement and rescue into visible conditions, yet resist reducing their subjects to illustrations of catastrophe.

Fog provides the series with its unifying visual language. It obscures the surroundings, loosens the figures from ordinary geography, and makes a once-familiar world appear uncertain. This atmosphere can initially seem elegiac, but the people and animals before the camera are survivors. Their composure introduces another register—neither easy reassurance nor unbroken despair, but the possibility of endurance after profound loss.

For a photobook collection concerned with environmental image-making, contemporary portraiture, or changing representations of human–animal relations, The Day May Break warrants sustained attention. Its significance lies not in documenting climate disruption from a distance, but in constructing a shared pictorial space for those already living with its consequences. As the first part of Brandt’s wider project, it also establishes the series’ central ethical and formal proposition: separate lives, placed together, can disclose the interdependence that environmental crisis makes impossible to ignore.