Nick Brandt: Inherit the Dust - (Hardcover)

About the Book

Three years after the completion of his trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls Across the Ravaged Land, Nick Brandt returned to East Africa to photograph the escalating changes to the African natural world and its animals. In a series of epic panoramas, Brandt recorded the impact of man in places where animals used to roam, but no longer do. In each location, Brandt erected a life-size panel of one of his portrait photographs-showing groups of elephants, rhinos, giraffes, lions, cheetahs and zebras-placing the displaced animals on sites of explosive urban development, new factories, wastelands and quarries. The contemporary figures within the photographs seem oblivious to the presence of the panels and the animals represented in them, who are now no more than ghosts in the landscape. Inherit the Dust includes this new body of panoramic photographs along with original portraits of the animals used in the panoramas, the unique emotional animal portraiture for which Brandt is recognized. There are also two essays by the artist: a text about the crisis facing the conservation of the natural world in East Africa, and behind-the-scenes descriptions of his elaborate production process, with accompanying documentary photographs.

Book Synopsis

In a series of epic African panoramas, Brandt records the impact of man in places where animals used to roam

Three years after the completion of his trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls Across the Ravaged Land, Nick Brandt returned to East Africa to photograph the escalating changes to the continent's natural world and its animals. In each location, Brandt erected a life-size panel of one of his portrait photographs--showing groups of elephants, rhinos, giraffes, lions, cheetahs and zebras--placing the displaced animals on sites of explosive urban development, new factories, wastelands and quarries. The contemporary figures within the photographs seem oblivious to the presence of the panels and the animals represented in them, who are now no more than ghosts in the landscape. Inherit the Dust includes this new body of panoramic photographs along with original portraits of the animals used in the panoramas, the unique emotional animal portraiture for which Brandt is recognized. There are also two essays by the artist: a text about the crisis facing the conservation of the natural world in East Africa, and behind-the-scenes descriptions of Brandt's elaborate production process, with accompanying documentary photographs.

Review Quotes

Nick Brandt's remarkable 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"

An evocative portrait of change and loss.--Alexandra Wolfe "The Wall Street Journal"

Brandt has deftly turned his art into a call for action.--Jack Crager "American Photo Magazine"

Brandt's new collection is his most powerful and heart-wrenching to date.-- "The Daily Beast"

Brandt's photographs, which at first glance can seem static, are in fact suffused with movement and with a sense of the ephemeral quality of life.--Peter Canby "The New Yorker, Photo Booth"

Here Nick Brandt applies his animal portraiture to a caveat about the Earth's fate... he places life-sized panels of grand endangered species--elephants, rhinos, zebras, lions, apes--in the exact locales where the animals once roamed.--Jack Crager "American Photo"

Jarring and powerful...the photos are as beautiful as they are melancholy.-- "Wired"

Nick Brandt's epic panoramas serve as a heartbreaking epitaph to a paradise lost.-- "Sunday Times UK"

Nick Brandt's new photographic work, i>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"

Sublime photos...a beautiful bleakness.-- "Mother Jones"

The contrast he draws is striking--both an elegy and an accusingly pointed finger... In Inherit the Dust, Brandt has found new life for some of his unreleased photos.--Jordan G. Teicher "Slate"

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.--Phillippe Garner, Co-Chairman, "Christies"

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 cinematic immersion and incredible detail.--Jim Casper "LensCulture"

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"

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 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

About the Author

Nick Brandt (born 1964) photographs exclusively in Africa. Born in Britain and currently based in Southern California, Brandt cofounded Big Life Foundation in 2010, which helps protect the endangered wildlife inhabiting a large area of East Africa.