nick | climate refugees | s3.4

What Are You Doing Here ?

The themes in Nick Brandt’s photographic series always relate to the destructive impact that humankind is having on both the natural world and now humans themselves too.

Nearly twenty years ago Nick Brandt started photographing the wild animals of Africa as an elegy to a dis-appearing world. After some years, seeing the escalating environmental destruction, he felt an urgent need to move away from that kind of work and address the destruction in a much more direct way. This led to the series, Inherit the Dust (2016) and This Empty World (2019). These were mainly about habitat loss and biodiversity loss, significantly as a result of human ex-pansion and development.

Nick established a style of portrait photography of animals in the wild similar to that of the photography of humans in studio setting, shot on medium format film, attempting to portray animals as sentient creatures not so different from us.

Nick’s The Day May Break (2021) series is the first part of a global series portraying people & animals impacted by environmental destruction. Photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya, the people in the photos have all been badly affected by climate change - displaced by cyclones that destroyed their homes, displaced & impoverished after years-long severe droughts.

The photos were taken at 5 sanctuaries/ conservancies. The animals are almost all long-term rescues, due to everything from poaching of their parents to habitat destruction & poisoning. These animals can never be released back into the wild. Now habituated, it was therefore safe for strangers to be photographed close to the animals in the same frame. Nick has had solo gallery and museum shows around the world, including New York, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris and Los Angeles. All of the series are published in book form. In descending order, Nick says the images are best viewed in a gallery, in the book or online full screen on your computer at the very least on your phone. You can discovery his work on his website www.nickbrandt.com

Nick is also the co-founder of Big Life Foundation, a non-profit in Kenya/ Tanzania, established 2010. They employ more than 300 local rangers protecting 1.6 million acres of the Amboseli / Kilimanjaro ecosystem.

We caught up with Nick at his home in California and if you want to know what word he would add to the dictionary... it rhymes with "schmuck" followed by wit.

The music on this episode are natural original sounds of Earth herself and the beautiful music of apoxode and Daniel Birch

Excerpt from "Love Letter to the Earth " Parallax Press (2013) by Thich Nhat Hanh was read by Greta