Nick Brandt

With Inherit The Dust, Nick Brandt returns to East Africa to photograph, in a unique and dramatically different way, the escalating changes to the continent’s natural world and its animals. In a series of epic panoramas, Brandt photographs in places where the animals used to roam, but due to the impact of man, no longer do. In each location, Brandt erects a life-size panel of portrait photographs that include groups of elephants, rhinos, giraffes, lions, cheetahs and zebra setting the panels within a world of explosive urban development, factories, wasteland and quarries. The panoramas constitute two thirds of the book. The final third features portraits of the animals that were featured in the panels, the kind of iconic animal portraiture for which Brandt is globally recognized. Vicki Goldberg, art critic and author, writes about the work: ‘Nick Brandt’s ravishing portraits of African animals are like premonitory memorials. In Inherit the Dust, his astonishing panoramas of those portraits installed lifesize 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.’ Kathryn Bigelow, Film Director (The Hurt Locker), writes: ‘Nick Brandt’s unvarnished, harrowing but stunning new work brings us face to face with a crisis, both social and environmental, demanding the renewal of humanity itself.’