#14 : ALLEYWAY WITH CHIMPANZEE, 2014

The transformative power of context, part 2:

The portrait of the chimpanzee in a river bed was taken back in 2003, but as with all the animal portraits in Inherit the Dust, it was never released. I had rejected the original portrait because I had hoped for more of an emotional connection with the chimp - that he might be looking at me.  

But here in the alleyway location, with his head bowed, he appears, in my mind, to be lamenting the loss of the world that he once knew, and the denuded world that is now there in its place. The photo of the chimp becomes much stronger, I believe, due to the context in which it is now placed. 

As always, the panel of the chimp portrait was placed on location (NOT dropped in via Photoshop) next to a semi-stagnant stream of fetid sewage (where perhaps a creek with clear forest water once ran?)

Technical :

Shot on medium format black and white film with a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, the final panoramic image is constructed of several negatives to capture the wide field of vision, which were pieced together in photoshop.

The photo is published INHERIT THE DUST.

The reproduction in the book is 13x15 inches (32cm x 38 cm). 

The book is $65 but currently just $45 on Amazon at http://goo.gl/qB06yW.

Signed copies are available at http://goo.gl/uYGEsp at photoeye for $65.


#14 : UNDERPASS WITH ELEPHANTS, 2015 (Lean Back, Your Life is On Track)

The transformative power of context. What do I mean? Read on....

I took the good but unremarkable photo of an elephant mother and her calves a few years ago, but didn’t think it special enough to release. But when revisiting it for Inherit the Dust, I realised how much more emotional and impactful it could be in its new incarnation. Placing the photo as a life-size panel at life size in this setting, the elephants look trapped between the monumental concrete pillars, uncertain of where to turn. The elephants also appear to be, for me at least, connected to the humans to the right of them.

When I chose this location, I never expected that these people would also be part of the photograph. They are all homeless, even the mothers with very young children and babies, who sleep beneath this underpass encircled by a central Nairobi roundabout.

It’s hard to see clearly from this tiny image online, but most of those boys, some as young as 6 or 7 years old, were high on glue from the bottles hanging from their faces.

The poisoned icing on the cake in relation to the homeless people is the cruelly juxtaposed billboard beyond, featuring a well-to-do middle class African man leaning back in a chair in his garden, with the tag line beneath: Lean Back, Your Life is On Track.

My plan had always been that, throughout the series, the animals in the panels would effectively be ghosts in the landscape. With these animals killed or driven from their habitat, the people now living within these landscapes would be oblivious to the presence of the animals that used to live there.

However,  in the final photo of the series, I wanted just one person, a child, to see the animals in the panel whilst all around, no-one else did.

But I never for a second imagined that this tiny boy on the right would wander into frame, fascinated by these giant elephants, and touch them with what appears to be a stick held in his hand. 

I would like to think that the image of babies here being the only ones to see the panels avoids the dangerous trap of easy sentimentality. My reason for it being babies is this -  I think we are all born with a instinctual connection to nature, and as we grow up, many of us lose that connection, influenced, seduced and distracted by societal pressure, teen pressure, etc. Hopefully most of us will find our way back, but many will not.

Technical :


Shot on medium format black and white film with a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, the final panoramic image is constructed of several negatives to capture the wide field of vision, which were pieced together in photoshop.
 

The photo is published in the book, INHERIT THE DUST.
 

The reproduction in the book is 13x27 inches (32cm x 67cm). The book is $40 on Amazon at http://goo.gl/qB06yW.
 

Signed copies are available at http://goo.gl/uYGEsp at photoeye for $65.
 

I would urge you to please buy the giant book, as these website images cannot begin to capture everything going on in the photos (the print at its best size is 120 inches / 300 cm long.)

 
#13 : WASTELAND WITH ELEPHANT, 2015

An elephant strides across the savannah towards camera. But where a sea of grass once was, all is human garbage.

The original photo of the elephant is a previously unreleased shot taken in 2008. A beautiful bull with the unlikely name of Little Male. He was speared the year after this photo was taken, but survived, and is hopefully still alive in the Amboseli ecosystem in southern Kenya.
 

A few hundred kms to the north is this dumpsite on the edge of the city of Nakuru. Elephants would have walked these hills several decades ago, walked across these plains and hills now strewn with garbage.

The people in the photo all live on the edges of the dumpsite, and spend their days scouring through the garbage for anything that they can use or sell. When the garbage trucks arrive, many will search through the garbage for food they can eat right there. I

t’s not just the animals that are the victims of environmental degradation and devastation, but humans also.

As with all the photos in this series, the life size photo of the elephant was printed at my studio in California, and then glued to a giant aluminum and plywood assembled on location. Multiple sandbags had to be used to raise up the panel so that the horizon line in the original photo lined up with the horizon line on the location.

I shot this and a few other panels close by over the course of a week, waiting for the right stormy clouds and accompanying light. One advantage of being there so long is that the local people became completely used to us being there, and just got on with their lives. I wanted it that way - for the people to be oblivious to the presence of the panels and the animals featured in them, who are now no more than ghosts in the landscape.

But not all is doom and gloom. Once up a time, we in the West had these animals where we lived. We blew it, wiped them out, but we still have a chance to protect and preserve the places and those animals where they still live, and at the same time help support local communities, through wide scale employment in nature tourism and wildlife preservation.
Go to biglife.org to learn about the work that Big Life Foundation, the organization I co-founded in 2010, is doing in this regard.

Technical :


Shot on medium format black and white film with a Mamiya RZ67 Pro II, the final panoramic image is constructed of several negatives to capture the wide field of vision, which were pieced together in photoshop.

The photo is published in INHERIT THE DUST (Feb 2016).

The reproduction in the book is 13x27 inches (32cm x 67cm). The book is currently $42 on Amazon here

Signed copies are available here at photoeye for $65.

I would urge you to please buy the giant book, as these website images cannot begin to capture everything going on in the photos (the print at its best size is 120 inches / 300 cm long.)

#12 : 

LINE OF RANGERS HOLDING TUSKS KILLED AT THE HANDS OF MAN, AMBOSELI 2011

I wish that I had never had to take this photo. 

I wish that it had never been possible to take this photo.

The photo was taken as a deliberate visual echo of Elephants Walking Through Grass, a very different world - a vision of paradise and plenty - taken only a couple of miles away three years earlier.

But instead of a herd of elephants striding across the grassy plains of Africa, here we see only their remains: the tusks of 22 elephants killed at the hands of man within the Amboseli/Tsavo Ecosystem.

The tusks of the elephant at the front? I find it hard to visualize the living elephant that possessed them. I’ve never seen elephants with tusks anything like that size, and now, I likely never will. They are all gone, dead, mostly killed by man, for their ivory.

So I think it’s safe to say there is no elephant left alive on the continent of Africa with tusks that size. Those two gargantuan tusks would probably fetch in excess of half a million dollars in China today. Perhaps more, as investors start to gamble on the elephants’ extinction, as the numbers of elephants in the wild plummets and tusks such as these become such a rarity.

However, everyone, please know that there is hope ---

The rangers holding the tusks are some of the 300 rangers employed by Big Life Foundation, the organization that I co-founded in 2010 to protect the animals and ecosystem of this region.

Today, these rangers protect the elephants and other animals of this unique and extraordinary ecosystem across a 2 million acre area, straddling Kenya and Tanzania.

Since Big Life was founded, the incidence of poaching has dramatically dropped in the ecosystems that the rangers patrol, one of the unfortunately few success stories in conservation currently in Africa.

But it is not easy to maintain this success. We need financial support. We need to expand into areas where the elephants and other animals are still being annihilated. So please, go to www.biglife.org to learn more, and donate today!

Technical :

The tusks were stored in Kenya Wildlife Service’s ivory strongroom. In July 2011, they permitted me to borrow them. Shot as always on medium format black and white film, the photograph is published in “Across The Ravaged Land”, available on Amazon.com, etc.

#11 : 

ELEPHANTS WALKING THROUGH GRASS, AMBOSELI 2008

Fail again. Fail better. 

Those are the immortal words of Samuel Becket. And the philosophy that best sums up my years-long attempts to get the 'perfect' photograph of a line of elephants crossing the African plains. 

I tried countless times over several years, never achieving, to my satisfaction, the line as I imagined it - simultaneous ideal choreography, light, and location. So I kept trying, what was ultimately hundreds of times.

So this photograph is my best attempt at failing better. 

The herd in the photo is being led by a wonderful matriarch named Marianna (by Amboseli Elephant Research). Photographed in 2008, she was 44 years old at the time. The following year, Marianna was killed by poachers.

Along with Igor, the elephant in Elephant Drinking, Marianna’s death was one of the reasons that I was motivated to co-found Big Life Foundation, which helps protect and preserve the wild animals of East Africa, and Marianna's home (To learn more about Big Life, please go to www.biglife.org.)

The photo was also the inspiration behind the somber photo taken three years later, Line of Rangers  Holding Tusks Killed at the Hands of Man, Amboseli, 2011. I’ll write about that photo next week.

Technical : As usual, the photo was shot on medium format black and white film. Also, as usual, this photo should be seen at its actual print size of 75 inches (190 cm) in length.

The photo is published in “A Shadow Falls” and “On This Earth, A Shadow Falls” (available on Amazon).

SIGNED copies of both are available at www.photoeye.com.

#10:

PETRIFIED BAT, LAKE NATRON, 2012

The photographer sighed wearily, part 2. Yes, the photo is meant to be this way up. The bat is hanging upside down, as you will see from the sky being at the bottom of the frame.

To take a portrait of an animal alive again in death, in the place where it lived and died. The portrait of an animal that I would never have been able to get close enough to otherwise. This was part of what obsessed me when I first unexpectedly found petrified birds and bats washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Tanzania.

I visited the lake whilst traveling through one the more stark areas of East Africa taking photos for the last book, Across The Ravaged Land, in my trilogy. It was dry season, so the waterline had receded revealing these petrified creatures along the shoreline. I thought they were extraordinary - every last tiny detail perfectly preserved down to the tip of the bat's tongue, the minute hairs on his face. 

Each day, me, my guide, and a few local Maasai would walk up and down the lake's shoreline, scouring for birds and bats. It was like a morbid treasure hunt.

No-one knows for certain exactly how the animals die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, just like a plate glass window, causing them to crash into the lake. The water has an extremely high soda content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to petrify, perfectly preserved, as they dry. (I have referred to the creatures as calcified in previous titles/descriptions, but “petrified” is the correct description).

We have found entire flocks of 100 dead small finches washed up on shore in a 50 yard stretch of shoreline. So clearly, they all died at once. Which suggests that the notion that they accidentally all flew into the glassy reflective surface of the water is a very plausible theory. All in all, not a great-sounding way to die.

All the creatures are rock hard when found, but are not stone, as reported in many articles. You cannot turn their heads, manipulate their wings, etc.

I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in ‘living’ positions, bringing them back to ‘life’, as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death.

In the instance of the bat, I placed a series of acacia thorns, the main tree around the lake, around it - photographing its portrait far closer than I ever could if it were living.

Shot as always on medium format black and white film, the photograph is published in “Across The Ravaged Land”, available on Amazon.com (SIGNED copies available from www.photoeye.com).

#9 : ABANDONED OSTRICH EGG, AMBOSELI 2007

It was the most curious sight. There, at the edge of the vast dried Amboseli lake bed, lay a lone, abandoned ostrich egg. 

For me, the sight was quite compelling. I’ve seen the very occasional abandoned ostrich egg, but never in a place like this. I waited for the sun to lower in the sky,  and then took this shot.

As the final image of A Shadow Falls,  the second book in the trilogy, is this an image of hope or of despair? An image of the end, or the hope of a new beginning.....

The photo is also published in “On This Earth, A Shadow Falls” (available on Amazon at :

www.amazon.com/Nick-Brandt-Earth-Shadow-Falls/dp/1938922441/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404234852&sr=1-1&keywords=on+this+earth+a+shadow+falls

and on amazon.co.uk at :

www.amazon.co.uk/Nick-Brandt-Earth-Shadow-Falls/dp/1938922441/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

SIGNED copies of the 4th edition printing of this book are also available at http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/citation.cfm?catalog=ZE223