A conversation with photographer Nick Brandt about his epic panoramic landscapes featured in Inherit the Dust and This Empty World. In these series of photographs and correlating books, Brandt makes powerful and haunting images revealing the mutual suffering of animals and humans as victims of environmental devastation.

Since 2001, British-born, California-based photographer Nick Brandt has been documenting the people and the animals impacted by environmental destruction through haunting portraits surrounded by the changing environment. Brandt’s ambitious photographic project, a trilogy of books memorializing the fast-disappearing natural grandeur of East Africa, was shot on medium-format black and white film without telephoto or zoom lenses. This body of work was a combination of epic panoramas of animals within dramatic landscapes and graphic, intimate portraits similar to studio portraiture of human subjects from the early 20th Century.

In 2010, in response to the rapid escalation of poaching in East Africa, Brandt founded the non-profit organization Big Life Foundation with conservationist Richard Bonham.

Today, multiple fully-equipped teams of Big Life rangers protect 2 million acres straddling Kenya and Tanzania, resulting in a dramatically reduced incidence of killing and poaching of elephants and other wildlife in the ecosystem.  Visit www.biglife.org to learn more.

This event was held on April 18, 2024.

About Nick Brandt
Nick Brandt (born 1964) is an English photographer, whose work focuses on the rapidly disappearing natural world, as a result of environmental destruction, climate change and human actions.  Raised in London, Brandt studied painting and then film at Saint Martin's School of Art.  He moved to California in 1992 where he directed numerous award-winning music videos for artists including Michael Jackson, Moby, Jewel, and XTC among others.  In 1995 while directing Jackson’s "Earth Song" in Tanzania, Brandt first encountered the animals and landscape that would later inspire him to address the global ecological crisis through innovative photographic strategies in works like Inherit the Dust and This Empty World.

ART IN DIALOGUE is a series of interdisciplinary conversations between members of the university and the wider community - reflecting the ways in which their work is dynamically engaged with other fields of inquiry.