![]() Learn more about Gina Williams on her personal website or her blog, Accents & Apertures. It has quite a visceral emotional impact on most people, and certainly did, and still does, for me.” It’s really a mutual situation: if conservation supports the community, that helps the people economically in the long term, and so they, reciprocally, support conservation.”īrandt continues to find inspiration in the African landscape, especially from the animals that inhabit the space: “you get something in parts of Africa that no longer exists in the developed world, or indeed almost anywhere in the wild outside a remaining few areas of sub-Saharan Africa: places where you can look out across the landscape and see multiple species en masse, in a single view. Conservation relies so much on the support of the community. “That is what, so far, we have managed to do with the Big Life Foundation in the Amboseli/Kilamanjaro ecosystem in Kenya. Despite this, Brandt is hopeful: “I find hope in knowing that with the right people and circumstances, ecosystems can be successfully protected,” he said. Unfortunately, like so many places on earth, Lake Natron is at risk of environmental degradation from human development. This causes the creatures to calcify as they dry, and thus they wind up perfectly preserved.” “The water has an extremely high soda and salt content-so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. Like birds smashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake,” Brandt said. “No one knows for certain exactly how die, but it appears that the extremely reflective surface of the lake water confuses them. In reality, the high concentrations of minerals in the water calcify and preserve them after they die. Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New YorkĬontrary to some reports about the photos, the creatures that happen to die in and around Lake Natron are not instantly turned to stone. “These are creatures I would have never otherwise been able to take portraits of, of course.” “The notion of portraits of dead animals in the place where they once lived drew me to photograph the creatures in the “Petrified” series,” he said. Brandt immediately envisioned the animals as they were before they met their demise. Walking the shores of Lake Natron, a caustic salt and soda lake in Tanzania, Brandt came across the “calcified” bodies of creatures that had died and become preserved thanks to the unique chemical environment. Other series include Brandt’s highly acclaimed, large-scale series Inherit the Dust, in which life-size panels featuring endangered and threatened species were placed within the landscapes where the animals used to roam-terrain that has since been ravaged by man. ![]() Brandt says he turned to film photography because he felt “photography, rather than moving images in narrative form” allowed him to express his feelings about the “sentience of animals and the disappearance of the natural world in a more personal, less compromised way.” He began shooting exclusively with film (this series was shot using Kodak TMax 100 film, for example). He fell in love with Africa in 1996 while directing the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” and from there, shifted his focus to Africa and still photography. ![]() ![]() ![]() Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New Yorkīefore turning to photography, Brandt had a high-profile filmmaking career. “This was the impetus behind the photographs of the lion, buffalo and kudu trophy heads: portraits of decapitated creatures killed by trophy hunters, appearing alive again in death, looking out over lands where once they lived and roamed in multitudes.” “So much of the African savannah, once teeming with wild animals, is now denuded to near-emptiness,” Brandt said. It was not, however, the vista that took his breath away, but instead the evidence of what was missing, lost, and destroyed: As British photographer Nick Brandt traveled through East Africa, he often found himself breathless at the scenes in front of him. ![]()
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