KUDA AND SKY I, ZIMBABWE

Nick Brandt is an English photographer who focuses his work around humanity’s destruction of the natural world. He spent nearly two decades photographing African wildlife and former wild areas decimated by human development, and now resides in the Southern Californian mountains. His fascination with the changing natural world is evident in series like Inherit the Dust (2016), where Brandt placed previously unreleased life-size animal portraits among sites of urban development, new factories, wasteland, and quarries, and This Empty World (2019), a series that addresses the destruction of the natural world and shows its impact on animals. Often photographing animals in black-and-white or sepia tones, Brandt portrays his subjects as sentient creatures not so different from humans. Experiences photographing African elephants and learning about their poaching prompted Brandt to co-found the Big Life Foundation, which protects the animals and ecosystem of a large swath of Kenya and Tanzania.