Published by Thames & Hudson in 2019, Nick Brandt’s This Empty World addresses the remaking of the East African savannah by human development. Rather than treating wildlife and local communities as separate subjects, Brandt places both within scenes of disrupted habitation. Animals appear amid gas stations, highway and bridge construction sites, and bus stations; people occupy those same altered spaces. Environmental degradation thus becomes a shared condition of displacement rather than a distant abstraction.
The pictures are neither conventional wildlife photographs nor straightforward records of development. Each finished image combines two photographs made weeks apart, usually from almost exactly the same camera position. Brandt first photographs an animal in its native landscape, then constructs a large set at that precise location to represent encroaching infrastructure. A second photograph introduces people drawn from local communities and elsewhere. The resulting composite joins field observation to elaborate staging, deliberately complicating the boundary between document and fabrication.
This was Brandt’s first project in color. The 120-page hardcover also includes his introductory essay and a descriptive behind-the-scenes section. These additions are integral to understanding the work: they disclose the practical structure behind images whose emotional force depends upon two different moments appearing to coexist. The book therefore presents not only the completed tableaux but also the reasoning and production methods that shaped them.
For collectors, its significance rests less on bibliographic status than on the coherence of the project and the documented shift in Brandt’s practice. Color, large constructed environments, repeated viewpoints, and the parallel treatment of human and animal vulnerability are brought together within a single sustained body of work. As a photobook, This Empty World offers a concentrated study of how contemporary staged photography can address environmental loss while preserving the unsettling presence of individual animals and people.
