Photographers

Nick Brandt (born 1964 in London) is a British photographer known for his monumental environmental and wildlife photography, focusing on the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the vulnerable communities who inhabit it. After studying painting and film at Saint Martin’s School of Art, he moved to California in 1992, directing award-winning music videos for artists such as Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Moby. It was during the filming of Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” in Tanzania in 1995 that Brandt developed a deep connection to East Africa and its wildlife.

Beginning in 2001, Brandt embarked on what would become his acclaimed East Africa trilogy—On This Earth, A Shadow Falls, and Across the Ravaged Land—photographed on medium-format film without telephoto lenses. His close-up, large-format animal portraits portray elephants, lions, and other species as dignified, sentient beings, challenging traditional wildlife photography and emphasizing their vulnerability in a rapidly vanishing world.

Brandt’s later conceptual projects confront human-driven environmental devastation more directly. Inherit the Dust (2016) placed life-size portraits of animals into landscapes destroyed by industrial expansion. This Empty World (2019), his first major color series, overlays images of animals and humans shot weeks apart, revealing a world overwhelmed by unrestrained development. Since 2021, his global series The Day May Break has portrayed people and animals affected by climate change across Zimbabwe, Kenya, Bolivia, and Fiji.

In 2010, Brandt co-founded Big Life Foundation, a major conservation organization protecting wildlife and ecosystems across Kenya and Tanzania. His work has been exhibited internationally in major cities worldwide, and he is recognized as one of the leading photographic voices documenting the climate crisis and the Anthropocene.