Nick Brandt’s Poignant Photography Captures A Vanishing World

A new photographic series from visionary photographer Nick Brandt documents with skill and sensitivity a human race on the verge of environmental catastrophe. The Echo of Our Voices–chapter four of Brandt’s seminal photographic series The Day May Break–depicts displaced Syrian refugees in Jordan’s Wadi Rum Desert in Jordan as they battle against the challenges posed by war, displacement and climate change.

In 2024 Brandt photographed Syrian families in the deserts of southern Jordan who had been displaced by the war in Syria between 2013 and 2013. His sculptural photographic compositions give a voice to these brave and stoic people who are forced to continually resettle and face daily challenges posed by the lack of water in Jordan, one of the world’s most water-scarce countries.

Brandt photographs the Jordanian families as they sit and stand together on stacks of boxes in a barren desert landscape or seek shelter from the blistering heat in the crook of a mountainside cave, creating sculptural images that present metaphors of pedestals for the unseen or forgotten peoples living on the perimeters of society. The families live a nomadic existence in search of agricultural work and in the hope of the elusive rain that will enable the growing of crops. Despite the daily challenges this peripatetic uprooted existence poses, Brandt’s photographs capture their dignity and pride in the strength of their family units.

Brandt and his team maintain contact with the families he photographed in Syria, and they remain hopeful that someday they will be able to return to their homes since the fall of the Assad regime.

Nick Brandt explains how The Day May Break photographic series presents a visual document of the challenges faced by people in war-torn or developing countries ravaged by climate change caused by the complacency of industrial countries and their over-indulgent carbon emissions: “Spread across the planet, there is a common link between the countries in which I have photographed this series so far: They all are among the countries that are the least responsible for climate breakdown. Their global carbon emissions have been tiny compared to industrial nations. Yet, like so many other poorer countries in the world, they are disproportionately harmed by its effects. The grim irony is that many people in these countries are the most vulnerable to the calamitous consequences of the industrial world’s ways.”

The Echo of Our Voices is a departure from the first three chapters of Brandt’s photographic series The Day May Break, for it demonstrates the solidarity of people in the wake of adversity, and how they hold on to each other tightly when most of their worldly possessions are lost.

There is a stillness in Nick Brandt’s photographs that doesn’t settle—it haunts. The celebrated photographer captures a world already unravelling. Shrouded in mist and heavy with metaphor, the images show displaced people and rescued animals standing together in shared vulnerability—a visual elegy for a planet in peril.

Brandt made a reputation for himself with evocative portraits of African wildlife and landscapes and has spent the past two decades documenting the ecological and human toll of environmental collapse. With The Day May Break Brandt turned his lens toward those already living on the frontlines of climate change—communities driven from their homes by drought, flood, and economic upheaval—and animals orphaned by habitat destruction.

Photographed in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Bolivia, and elsewhere, these staged but emotionally raw scenes are more than just portraits; they’re parables. In fog-drenched sanctuaries and shelters, humans and animals coexist in surreal proximity, gazing into the camera—or beyond it—as if already living in a post-collapse world. The mist that veils each frame isn’t just atmospheric; it’s symbolic.

What makes The Day May Break photographic series so unforgettable is Brandt’s refusal to rely on spectacle. Instead, he finds quiet power in the dignity of his human and animal subjects, many of whom have experienced climate-related displacement or trauma yet manage to retain a quiet resilience.

Brandt’s use of monochrome and soft light lends the work a timeless, almost mythic quality. But this is no fantasy—it’s a mirror. Climate change, Brandt insists, is not some distant specter but a crisis unfolding now, disproportionately affecting those least responsible for it.

The Day May Break is not just art; it’s a clarion call that the world needs to wake up and confront what is happening to humanity and the planet. Through powerful imagery and accompanying narratives, Brandt urges us to confront a truth we often ignore: the fate of humans, animals, and the planet is inseparably linked.

Brandt’s work resists easy optimism, but it isn’t devoid of hope. There’s tenderness in every frame, a recognition of our shared fragility and the possibility of compassion. In a world fractured by crisis, The Day May Break offers a rare kind of clarity—the kind that comes not from distance, but from standing close enough to see the humanity in every face, human or otherwise.

Brandt’s The Day May Break series has been exhibited all over the world including at the Milan International Photography Fair, the Cankarjev Dom Culture Center in Ljubljana, and most recently at Art Dubai. He will be exhibiting at AIPAD in New York from 23rd until 26th April, and will feature in group exhibition Rhythms at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Latvia in May. Other upcoming exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Polka Galerie in Paris in September 2025 and a solo show at Hangar Art Center in Brussels in September 2025. Brandt will be publishing a photographic book The Echo of Our Voices with Skira Books in September 2025,