Nick Brandt ventures underwater for the latest chapter of his global project exploring themes of environmental destruction. He tells Keith Wilson about the challenges faced and lessons learned
When Nick Brandt released the first chapter of his climate crisis-inspired project, The Day May Break, I questioned him about the reasons for the ambiguous meaning of the title. In an AP interview three years ago, he replied: ‘Yes, it’s dual meaning: either the day may break and the world will shatter, or the day may break and the dawn will still come. The dual meaning is because the people and the animals in these pictures are all survivors, and in that alone lies hope and possibility.’
With an accompanying book of the same name, The Day May Break continued Brandt’s focus on ‘addressing humankind’s destruction of the natural world’ as depicted in his celebrated, large-scale photo epics of the previous 20 years. But with this work – first in Zimbabwe and Kenya, and then Bolivia – equal billing was granted to the human occupants of these affected lands photographed alongside the endangered wildlife.
As he put it at the time, ‘Climate change dramatically impacts the human race as well. I feel that we are all creatures on the same planet, both animal and human.’
Visual connections
Now, with the third chapter of this series, Sink/Rise, Brandt’s camera has focused entirely on the human predicament, as represented by the people of Fiji who are faced with the prospect of a drowning world caused by the unrelenting rise in sea levels. But the absence of wildlife isn’t the only point of difference to the first two chapters of this ongoing project: the images in Sink/Rise have been shot entirely underwater.
At first, it might seem a radical departure from Brandt’s photographic canon, but these portraits of sombre-faced locals weighted down on a seafloor littered with bleached and broken coral maintain the visual and symbolic connections to his earlier photos of the ravaged lands of Kenya, Zimbabwe and Bolivia. There may be no fog this time to remind us of the smoke of a burning planet or a creeping pandemic, but the cloudy water makes for a perfect parallel as it reveals these rising seas to be sick, lifeless and unstoppable in their reach.
The idea for The Day May Break began when wildfires were burning out of control across much of California, where the British-born photographer now lives. However, Brandt’s plans to begin the series in the Golden State were thwarted by the outbreak of Covid-19 in early 2020 and the resulting travel restrictions. Instead, he returned to his familiar African haunts of Kenya and Zimbabwe
