Nick Brandt, photography

2. “My images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted
Africa. They're my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing”.
NickBrandt

23. “I'm not interested in creating work that is simply documentary or filled with action and drama, which
has been the norm in the photography of animals in the wild. What I am interested in is showing the
animals simply in the state of Being. In the state of Being before they are no longer are. Before, in the wild
at least, they cease to exist. This world is under terrible threat, all of it caused by us. To me, every creature,
human or nonhuman, has an equal right to live, and this feeling, this belief that every animal and I are
equal, affects me every time I frame an animal in my camera. The photos are my elegy to these beautiful
creatures, to this wrenchingly beautiful world that is steadily, tragically vanishing before our eyes”.

24. Nick Brandt was born in 1966 and raised in London, England, Brandt studied
Painting, and then Film at Saint Martin’s School of Art.(born 1964) is an English photographer who photographs exclusively in
the African continent, one of his goals being to record a last testament to the wild animals and places
there before they are destroyed by the hands of man.
He moved to the United States in 1992 and directed many award-winning music videos for the likes of
Michael Jackson (“Childhood”, “Earth Song”, “Stranger in Moscow”, “Cry”, “One More Chance”), Moby,
Grayson Hugh, Jewel (singer), XTC, Badly Drawn Boy. It was while directing “Earth Song”, a music
video for Jackson in Tanzania, in 1995 that Brandt fell in love with the animals and land of East Africa.
Over the next few years, frustrated that he could not capture on film his feelings about and love for
animals, he realized there was a way to achieve this through photography, in a way that he felt no-one
had really done before.
Nick Brandt does not use telephoto lenses because he believes that being close to the animals make a
huge difference in his ability to reveal their personality. He writes: “You wouldn’t take a portrait of a
human being from a hundred feet away and expect to capture their spirit; you’d move in close.”

25. Guida Burt
guidaburt@gmail.com
2017 May