Nick Brandt: This Empty World
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Thames & Hudson Ltd
Published:7th Feb '19
Should be back in stock very soon
Working in colour for the first time, Nick Brandt’s latest project uses complex composition and dramatically cinematic staging to highlight environmental degradation in the world and its effect on both animal and human life
This Empty World, Nick Brandt’s new monograph, features a series of dramatically staged photographs that bring together and reveal the animals and people of East Africa as the victims of environmental degradation in an emotionally powerful, cinematic way.
Moving into colour photography for the first time, the work is both a technical tour-de-force and a massively ambitious project in which several sets are constructed on a scale typically only seen in film production. Each panoramic image is a combination of two moments in time, almost all of them captured weeks apart from the exact same camera position.
Brandt first builds and lights a partial set, then waits for the animals that inhabit the region to enter the frame. Once captured on camera, the full set is built with the camera remaining fixed in place. The sets include bridge and highway construction sites, a petrol station, a bus station and even a dead forest. Completing the scene with a huge cast drawn from local communities, Brandt then photographs the second sequence. The final large scale prints are a composite of the two intricately plotted elements.
Viewed as a whole, the images vividly illustrate a world in which, overwhelmed by runaway human development, there is no longer space for animals to survive, and beg the question: what kind of world will we live in when stripped of its natural wonders.
Photographed on unprotected, inhabited Maasai community land, after the sets were removed and their elements recycled, no evidence of the images now remains in the landscape.
'Astonishing … a new genre of photography, both technological and conceptual, that brings together science and the visual arts … delivers the emotional shock rarely felt, but needed in full, to accelerate global conservation' - E.O. Wilson, Theorist, Biologist & Author
'Nick Brandt has captured in art, what our minds have could not have imagined … These images vividly remind us that a future without our wildlife and the options that they bring is a desperately poor one. It does not have to be this way. We just have to wake up and look at Brandt's images to see what we are doing' - Dr. Paula Kahumbu, O.G.W., Chief Executive Officer WildlifeDirect, Kenya
'Shows how wildlife and humans collide on a grand scale' - Choice
'Powerful and haunting' - Widewalls
'A harrowing and deeply moving omen of a landscape devoid of its wildlife and essential life force' - Hero
'This work, for the first time in digital and in colour, shows us both the possibility and the impossibility of animals coexisting with man' - The Eye of Photography
'Brandt’s photographs – which never hide the fact that they have been staged – address this question. How can humanity co-exist with the natural world and at what cost?' - The Herald
'Nick Brandt’s new work shows people and animals alike swept away in a tide of progress' - Mother Jones
'Showcases stunning scenes of animals and humans trying to live side by side in a rapidly developing environment' - Daily Beast
'Brandt paints a compelling yet devastating picture of the state of nature on our planet through his cinematic photographs, presented here at large scale for maximum impact' - Outdoor Photography
'Dazzles with its imposing scale, colorful detail, and technical ambition … an arresting body of work' - Brooklyn Rail
'A collection of epic, eerie and beautiful panoramas' - Digital Camera Magazine
ISBN: 9780500545140
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 1950g
128 pages