Nick Brandt: The Echo of Our Voices

Nick Brandt, Women with Sleeping Children, Jordan, 2024

By CARLOTA GAMBOA, April 17, 2025

Nick Brandt is a photographer whose camera aims to convey the rumblings of an uncertain future. Traveling across continents and getting to know different communities, Brandt’s objective as an artist is to strikingly reflect the reality of climate change by working with those who have been most affected by its rapid escalation. Whether it be by accentuating a landscape absent of the animals that used to inhabit what is now an overwrought city in the series Inherit the Dust (2016), or through the visual metaphor captured in SINK / RISE (2023) of South Pacific islanders photographed underwater in the face of rising ocean levels—Brandt is an artist who not only aims to capture the magnificence of nature and its inhabitants, but one who is able to facilitate a story of the Earth as well. His work is poetic, focused on bridging the different iterations of an increasingly communal narrative through metaphor and exhibition. 

“Climate change is the most consequential subject matter on the planet,” Brandt tells me as soon as we begin the conversation. After discussing some of the responses of other artists to this subject matter, Brandt continues: “It’s no surprise to me that there are other people creating work about this in whatever field. In my ideal world there would be far more of us. I wish there were more of us.” The California-based (though he plans on leaving the U.S. soon), British photographer made his political leanings very clear, adding, “Every socio-political subject matter in this day and dark age requires more and more voices.” 

Nick Brandt, Zaina, Laila and Haroub, Jordan, 2024

Brandt’s ongoing series, The Day May Break (2021-2024), consists of four chapters. Each segment of the ongoing project follows a different community or environment already impacted or threatened by climate degradation. “When I first came up with the idea for the project in 2020, I actually only had one chapter in mind. It so happened that the only place I could get into during the Covid-19 pandemic was Kenya. As I finished that shoot, Zimbabwe opened up, and so I went down there and shot in Zimbabwe.” 

Letting himself be led through the experience, as though the world was opening up to give Brandt creative direction, shows the kind of spirit he goes into projects with. In tandem with extensive research getting to know a local community and their condition, Brandt’s narrative is one that goes beyond a regiment. It’s a story that comes alive in a moment due to the details and choices present in an image’s staging, alive because his impulses lead him to a particular place with a particular person or animal in front of him, decisions that could have different outcomes if any other element had been different as well.

“Each time I go into a chapter, I don’t know what’s coming next,” he says. “It’s where my head is at a certain point and also what’s most aggravating me, because a lot of this comes from a place of agitation at what is happening to the world.” After photographing in Kenya, Bolivia, and Fiji, Brandt found himself in Jordan for the fourth chapter of The Day May Break. Entitled The Echo Of Our Voices, this chapter is partially funded by the Gallerie d’Italia Museum in Turin. Brandt states that it was “totally unexpected.” Having just finished an ocean series, he recalls a friend and fellow photographer talking about going down to Jordan. “She had described the desert as harsh and full of soft contrast, illusions within reality, and that triggered a concept in my mind. I thought, Oh, I should go from water to absolute absence of water. And so those four chapters are across four different continents.” 

Nick Brandt, Rakan Sisters, Jordan, 2024

Brandt dives into his thought process when initiating a chapter and how it led to this most recent one: “Every time I begin a project I think this one isn’t too complicated. I’m always very idealistic and naive about how complicated it will be. When I came up with the idea of Chapter Four, I thought I was just putting a bunch of people on boxes and that’s all I would be doing. But of course it wasn’t just that. I could’ve made that shoot very simple, comparatively, if I had put boxes in the back of the truck and gone to where the Syrian families were at that moment.” Brandt is referring to the fact that these families live in a state of permanent displacement as a result of climate change after already fleeing Syria as refugees and now have to move multiple times a year to where there has been sufficient rainfall for crops to grow so that they can be hired for agricultural labor. 

“If I had gone to them,” he continues, “and gathered the boxes in front of their tents, that would’ve been so much simpler. But I wanted to use the desert as a symbol of intensifying desiccation, particularly the Wadi Rum Desert with those mountains. The shapes of those mountains were a visual echo, of the people, the verticality of the people standing on the boxes, so when you look at the photographs you see those visual rhythms, the verticality of the mountains flowing into the verticality of the people on the boxes, and the reason for that verticality was for me a sense of strength, defiance, and resilience in the face of such adversity. There’s a whole extra layer to being a refugee in a way that you and I can’t understand, that when you're away from everything you know, all you have is each other, so that was really the defining thought in our minds as we were choreographing the families.”  

Nick Brandt, Ahmed, Zaina and Ftaim Families, Jordan, 2024

Brandt might feel the need to challenge himself with finding original ways of expressing human emotions and go out of his way to push into the unknown but the most remarkable aspects to his work are the stakes and scales of these projects, the tenderness behind each frame, and the way it resonates into the viewer’s understanding of the story his images tell. “I always feel the need to challenge myself with something that I haven't done before, come up with a concept that I hope is new, that challenges me, that frightens me—in a good way, you know, fear being a creative catalyst—because how am I going to do this? So this project has organically grown, and, unfortunately given the state of the world, organically speaking, I just keep on going around the world as a way to capture that.” 

The Echo of Our Voices will be presented in a solo exhibition with Gilman Contemporary at AIPAID Photography Fair and several other showcases and exhibitions around the world this year. 

To learn more about Nick Brandt, please visit his website here and follow him on Instagram @nickbrandtphotography