Nick Brandt

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.

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.

In 2001, Nick Brandt embarked on an ambitious photographic project, a trilogy of books memorializing the fast-disappearing natural grandeur of East Africa. Focusing on some of the world's last great populations of large mammals--elephants, giraffes, lions, gorillas and their kin--he created two of the twenty-first century's most popular photographic books: the instant bestsellers On This Earth (2005) and A Shadow Falls (2009). Portraying East Africa's animals with a solemnity and empathy usually reserved for human subjects, Brandt's photographs "tell us, in a way that is beyond words, that we do not own this planet, and are not the only beings living on it who matter," as philosopher Peter Singer writes in an essay in this new volume. On This Earth, A Shadow Falls collects the most memorable images from Brandt's first two books in a handsome linen-bound edition, printed in quadratone at Meridian in the U.S. A bestseller since its release in 2012, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls includes essays by Peter Singer, renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, author Alice Sebold and photography critic Vicki Goldberg. With Africa's natural resources being fast wiped out, this volume stands all the more movingly as a last testament and elegy to a disappearing world.

Nick Brandt (born 1966) photographs exclusively in Africa, using medium-format black-and-white film without telephoto or zoom lenses. Born in Britain and currently based in Southern California, Brandt cofounded Big Life Foundation in September 2010, which helps protect the endangered wildlife inhabiting a large area of East Africa.