PRAISE FOR THIS EMPTY WORLD
"The astonishing images in This Empty World by Nick Brandt deliver the emotional shock rarely felt, but urgently needed, to accelerate global conservation."
— E.O.Wilson, Theorist, Biologist, Author
"Stunning...Nick Brandt's This Empty World is a bold assault on human greed, capitalism and consumer culture."
— Musee Magazine
"Epic and cinematic."
— Colin Gleadell, The Telegraph, UK
"This Empty World showcases stunning scenes of animals and humans trying to live side by side in a rapidly developing environment...A stunning cinematic quality..."
— The Daily Beast
"Harrowing and deeply moving."
— Hero Magazine
"This Empty World dazzles with its imposing scale, colorful detail, and technical ambition...an arresting body of work."
— The Brooklyn Rail
"Technical and emotional marvels."
— L.A. Weekly
"Extraordinary work...This Empty World is a truly smart way of raising awareness, for it forces us to rethink our expectations, our take on photography, and ultimately, the destruction of our planet."
— F-Stop Magazine
"Splendid...hugely dramatic and emotional mise-en-scenes."
— L'Oeil de la Photographie
"Highly crafted images on a panoramic scale..This Empty World is a masterpiece."
— The Photo Review
"This Empty World is a captivating account of wildlife colliding hard against an endless tide of human encroachment. Brandt's masterpiece images reflect the ambivalence of a world looking away from its own shadows. The images are monumental achievements."
— Riot Material
"This Empty World is a blazoning exploration of the vulnerability of animals and humans in an era of environmental degradation.
Brandt's vision communicates the urgency of environmental issues with undiluted conviction. The works' impact, immediate and direct, is informed by a painstakingly deliberate and nuanced process.
Brandt's finished works...of the wild animals and the human-inhabited sets, create startling scenes of the two worlds in direct dialogue."
— Art Daily
"Once again, Nick Brandt has captured in art what our minds could not have imagined, and yet we knew all along. Brandt powerfully reminds us that the modern future that we are creating through unthinking development is a dark, dusty and empty one in which our spectacular wild animals have no future.
These images vividly remind us that a future without our wildlife, and the economic opportunities for local people that they bring, is a desperately pooor 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, Conservationist, Author
PRAISE FOR INHERIT THE DUST
Nick Brandt’s ravishing portraits of African animals are like premonitory memorials, taken to aid the cause of staving off extinction. In Inherit the Dust, his astonishing panoramas of those portraits - installed as life-size panels in industrial and urban wastelands that have trampled the animals’ habitats - are a jolting combination of beauty, decay, and admonishment.
The result is an eloquent and complex “J’accuse”, for the people are as victimized by “development” as the animals are.
The breadth, detail, and incongruity of Brandt’s panoramas suggest a collision between Bruegel and an apocalypse in waiting."
— Vicki Goldberg, Art Critic, Author
The wasted lands in Inherit The Dust were once golden savannah, sprinkled with acacia trees, where elephants, big cats and rhinos roamed. These now dystopian landscapes - as Nick Brandt’s unvarnished, harrowing but stunning work reveals - brings us face to face with a crisis, both social and environmental, demanding the renewal of humanity itself.
—Kathryn Bigelow, Film Director, The Hurt Locker
The images in Inherit The Dust are heart-wrenching and important. This tough new series is a call to action – if it is not too late – and pulls no punches in confronting us with the devastation of their habitat.
—Philippe Garner, Co-Chairman, Christies
With Inherit The Dust, the quiet dignity of the animals that Nick Brandt photographs is shockingly juxtaposed against the indignity and disarray of our own. These haunting photographs force us to think about what we are doing, and who is at stake.
— Carl Safina, Author, Biologist, Beyond Words, What Animals Think & Feel
Nick Brandt's magnificent, remarkable and truly original new work, Inherit The Dust, is a photographic essay in environmental ethics. He asks, in the most stark fashion: "What are we doing to this planet? What have we gained, and what have we - and the other animals with whom we share our planet - lost?"
— Peter Singer, Philosopher, Author, Animal Liberation
"Nick Brandt's "Inherit the Dust" is his visual cry of anguish about the looming apocalypse for animals and habitats in Africa...The resulting images are simultaneously beautiful and horrifying, because they illustrate the irreconcilable clash of past and present."
— Michelle Bogre, American Photo
"Brandt's new collection is his most powerful and heart-wrenching to date."
— The Daily Beast
"Nick Brandt's epic panoramas serve as a heartbreaking epitaph to a paradise lost."
— Sunday Times UK
"Jarring and powerful...the photos are as beautiful as they are melancholy."
— Wired
"Sublime photos...a beautiful bleakness".
— Mother Jones
"An evocative portrait of change and loss".
— Wall Street Journal
"Nick Brandt's latest work is both gorgeous and disturbing...
Brandt has deftly turned his art into a call for action."
— Jack Crager, American Photo, 10 Best New Photobooks Spring 2016
"The wall-size prints of "Inherit the Dust" are impeccably beautiful and stunning,
as well as profoundly disturbing. They convey the vast spaces and light of
contemporary Africa with a cinematic immersion and incredible detail.
When standing in front of his images, the viewer is transported into the scenes -
sometimes with wonder and awe and joy, and other times with overwhelming
sadness, despair and disgust."
— Jim Casper, LensCulture
PREVIOUS SELECTED REVIEWS & QUOTES
African wildlife has never looked so regal and mysterious as in Brandt’s grave photographs. His elephants appear as weighty as the pyramids. His rhinos look more ancient than carbon. His apes know something we don’t. Powerful reminders that Africa is a magnificent—and endangered—treasure house of animal life.
— Time Magazine (Time Top Five Photographic Books)
Nick Brandt's images of the animals of Eastern Africa take one's breath away. These powerful glimpses of another world are so intimate one might hear the rustle of brush as a cheetah makes herself known, or the breathing of a lion as he stands alert. One cannot help but connect with these animals. They each have a unique personality. But it is not mere intimacy that attracts.
Brandt's pictures are beautifully composed, sensuous portraits. Heartbreakingly beautiful, these strong and vital creatures seem somehow fragile, ephemeral. We must ensure that it is not only in images that they are preserved.
— Black & White Magazine, USA
Combining splendid natural backdrops with a portraitist’s approach to animals, the images show not only the reckless beauty of Africa’s vanishing wilds but also the humanity of its creatures. The photos have an uncanny intimacy. Brandt brings a compositionally precise and painterly style to a genre dominated by action shots and documentary image making.
— American Photo, USA (Top 10 Photographic Books)
The haunting images seem less like a documentary than like spirit photos of mythical beasts. Living testimony to the ghostly beauty and the fragility of nature, these magnificent creatures will convince you (if indeed you had any doubts) that animals not only have minds and hearts but also spirits and souls.
— O: The Oprah Magazine
“His approach is the antithesis of conventional wildlife photography and moves his work into the arena of fine art. . . . shows you how animal pictures should be taken.”
— The Daily Telegraph, UK
“Wildlife photography has become a holiday and adventure cliche: have telephoto lens, will snap view up rhino's nostril -- so uninteresting, so blah.
And then there's Nick Brandt. Brandt eschews the telephoto lens in favour of patience combined with a rare courage, determination and an artist's eye to photograph wildlife. The results are animals so accustomed to Brandt's presence and so untroubled by him that his pictures are breathtakingly beautiful and touching in their honesty and emotion....He clearly has an affinity with these glorious creatures that's heart-stopping. “
— Sunday Telegraph, Australia
“Nick's exquisite photographs arouse deep emotions. They inspire a sense of awe at the beauty of creation and the sacredness of life. It's almost impossible to look through his work without sensing the personalities of the beings whom he has photographed.”
— Jane Goodall, Primatologist and Conservationist
"Nick Brandt's photographs are both epic and iconic. It's a vision of Africa that we have not seen before.”
— Mary Ellen Mark, Photographer
“Nick Brandt's photography is beautiful and elegaic in a classic way, and also ‘strange’ in the best sense; those who know East Africa must grieve to think that our own species could be so greedy and unwise as to let such magnificent creatures disappear.”
— Peter Matthiessen, Author of “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”
“The photographs of Nick Brandt are both beautiful and haunting. They come upon you in a flush of abundance that is almost impossible to recover from.... You are about to enter a world of the imagination where all the animals are real, both fragile and full of grace.”
— Alice Sebold, Author of “The Lovely Bones”