Sing a song of the earth before dawn breaks

When Nick Brandt went to East Africa to shoot a music music video, he did not expect to have a deep connection with this place and would dedicate the rest of his life to animals and ecological protection, and the tool he found was photography. The music video is Michael Jackson's famous "Song of the Earth" in 1995, a short apocalyptic film in which the world faces post-war wreckage, wild animals being killed, forests being cut down, children being killed, and people kneeling on the ground, holding dirt, shouting, and praying. An angry Michael Jackson questioned: "The earth is crying, the coast is crying, what have we done to the world?" "Under his cry, time goes back, war and injury fade, and life returns.

The single sold more than 3 million worldwide, won many awards, and made Nick Brandt feel affection for the scenery of Tanzania in East Africa, but he did not return immediately, but traveled as a tourist with a film camera in the following years. His career was still as a music short film and commercial director, and after graduating from St. Martin's College of Art in London, he moved to the United States to develop, settling in California from the 90s.

Until finally fed up with the rules of the film industry, Nick Brandt turned to photography and focused on the wildlife of East Africa. In 2001 he started a shooting project: to create dirges for disappearing animals. He admits that nature and animal protection precede photography.

In 2005, he released his first photo book, On Earth, featuring black-and-white portraits of wildlife in East Africa. One of the most famous and memorable is his photograph of elephants, which are painted in gray tones and occupy a large position in the picture, they are solemn and solemn, as if they have existed on earth since the beginning of creation.

After that, Nick Brandt launched "Shadowfall" in 2009 and "Through the Ravaged Land" in 2013, completing the "trilogy". The trilogy is darker than the other, Nick wrote an elegy through photography, in which animals are killed and the effects of human and environmental degradation become clear, and if the short film "Song of the Earth" shows a vision, the subsequent trilogy reveals a horrific scene - the scene after the death of heaven.

This is not sentimentality about the developing world, but a reaction to changes in reality. Since 2008, there has been a new peak in the hunting of wild animals. The price of ivory soared from $200 a pound in 2004 to more than $2,000 a pound in 2010, triggering a new round of hunting. At the same time, the number of lions and giraffes is also declining. Nick Brandt returned to Kenya's Amboseli National Park in 2010 to shoot the final part of the trilogy and was surprised to find that the elephants filmed just a few years ago had been hunted one by one since 2009, including the elephant drinking water in his most classic work, 49-year-old Igor.

Given this reality, Nick Brandt teamed up with Kenyan conservationist Richard Bonham and Damian Bale, who cares about community and conservation, to form the Big Life Foundation, which organizes forest rangers across Kenya and Tanzania for de facto animal protection. The ranger currently has a total of more than 300 people, more than 30 field troops, 14 patrol vehicles, 2 tracking dogs and 2 aircraft to protect the 1.6 million acres of ecosystem in Amboseli/Kilimanzaro.

From this time on, the moral of Nick Brandt's photography became more obvious and urgent. His 2016 book Inheriting Dust juxtaposed animal images with human scenes for the first time, where heaven is no longer and the world is full of ruins and factories, which are a cycle of "progress" in the development of abandonment. He enlarged and pasted his past portraits of East African animals on huge boards and erected them in different places, including garbage dumps, construction sites and other scenes, which were once animal paradise and are now wasteland.

Many people think that this group of photographs of Nick Brandt is a collage of computer software, and do not know his complicated shooting process. A short film can be seen in the exhibition that demystifies the filming process, pointing out that placing images of animals on site is of great significance to the photographer, and in the process can also observe the reaction of the locals, just as the issue of ecological protection ultimately depends on the strength of the local community, and the weight of people in Nick Brandt's photographic projects is also increasing.

In This Empty World, launched in 2019, he truly realized that animals and humans appear in the same scene, albeit by shooting separately and then collage. This Empty World creates a crowded African environment in which animals and humans are dazed in a story of cookie-cutter urban development, in which animals and humans are dazed in a dark, man-made, man-made scene in which they do not know their way out.

Humans and animals are survivors

Before the latest series "Before Dawn", which is the batch of works that came to the Shanghai Photography Art Center, Nick Brandt experienced the 2018 California wildfires, destroyed his home, and saw the impact of the 2019-2020 Australian fires, which made him urgently concerned about climate change. "Before Dawn" is a global project launched in 2020 to propose the biggest of all possible crises: climate change, or climate collapse, will have a negative impact on all life on Earth.

What we see in the exhibition so far includes Nick Brandt's 2020 and 2021 shoots in Kenya, East Africa, Zimbabwe, and Bolivia in South America. As the Los Angeles Weekly review: "Gorgeous, rich, and dramatic images, these images are not a vision of Eden of coexistence, but an urgent call for action." ”

His dramatic approach to photography is as pure as his earliest animal portraits, but with a much richer connotation, even uncomfortable at the first place. The one that impressed me the most - "Lucio and Chaska", a middle-aged man and an orangutan in the same picture, they are both presented sideways, eyes looking ahead of themselves. The whole picture is shrouded in gray tones of black and white, the background is almost invisible, and a layer of mist is filled. Both people and animals are very quiet, like classical portraits. The eyes of humans and animals are similar, not only do they look in the same direction, but they also carry the same feelings of loss. The animals in the foreground are larger than people, and in the eyes of photographers, animals are spiritually comparable to humans, and they are by no means inferior creatures, but are only classified as an inferior and passive position in the system constructed by humans.

Looking at the other works in this series, people and animals are in this relationship of equal coexistence, although there is almost no more interaction between them, but the movement presents a surprising consistency, the photographer's magic is that this consistency is not a deliberate result, but an expression of internal consistency.

From animals to people, Nick Brandt says this is the first time he's put people in the center of an image. He repeatedly emphasized that the people and animals in these works were shot together, by no means post-processing, and at the same time, he also emphasized that the animals in these works all live in protected areas and are animals that have become accustomed to humans, which makes it possible to shoot together. And judging from their state, these animals are treated well, so they can show a relaxed and natural state in the shooting.

These elephants, rhinos, pangolins, cheetahs, orangutans, flamingos... Having experienced poaching, habitat destruction, or poisoning, they are animals rescued by humans, domesticated and no longer ready to be released into the wild. These people, climate refugees found in advance by researchers near the reserve, also have a home to not return, each person and each animal has a name, a story.

One of the most unbearable stories for Nick Brandt is Alice, Stanley and Nagin, Kenya, when floodwaters wash away Alice and Stanley's house in central Kenya, forcing them to move elsewhere and start from scratch. Nagin, the northern white rhinoceros shown in the same shot, is one of the last two northern white rhinos left in the world, and if he and his daughter Fatu die, the species will become extinct.

The people and animals in the picture are survivors, and they represent hope in themselves.

After filming in Bolivia, Nick Brandt will continue the project elsewhere. His further plan is to photograph climate change in the United States and promote awareness of climate disasters.

Nick Brandt's sense of action and morality set him far from the usual impression of artists. From the beginning, he was also different from a wildlife photographer, both in terms of his working methods and the style of his work. Wildlife photographers often go to deserted places alone with a camera, but Nick Brandt often works as a team, and he doesn't like to use zoom lenses, preferring wide-angle lenses and needing to get as close to the subject as possible. The difference between him and animal photographers can be seen very clearly in This Empty World. This method of shooting sets is also used in advertising photography, but what we see in advertising photography is to highlight the story scene and scene setting, and Nick Brandt uses this form to express his view of African ecology.

In the "Before Dawn" project, he returned to a minimalist set, in addition to the protagonists, at most a light bulb, a set of tables and chairs, in addition, a fog machine, a few lamps. This makes these works even more intriguing. It fundamentally questions anthropocentrism in a gentle way with empathy, and it does evoke thinking about this kind of question without asserting it, but Nick Brandt repeatedly reveals the urgency, before dawn, will the day break or will the sun rise as usual? Nick Brandt calls for action. (Brother Chop, MV Director, Animal Protection, Cinematographer)

Source: Beijing Youth Daily