SINK / RISE: The Day May Break, Chapter Three

Nick Brandt's third chapter in his ongoing global series takes a drastic turn from the fog-shrouded African and Bolivian landscapes of the first two books. For SINK / RISE, he went underwater. The photographs show Fijian islanders from Savusavu, on the island of Vanua Levu, performing ordinary acts on the ocean floor: sitting at a kitchen table, perched on a seesaw, standing in an embrace. They are wearing street clothes. They are 2-4 metres below the surface. They are holding their breath. There is no underwater breathing equipment, no post-processing to relocate people into the sea. Everything was shot in-camera, on location, over six weeks.

The ocean floor itself carries a second story. The site was a field of coral fragments smashed by Cyclone Winston in 2016, one of the strongest cyclones ever to make landfall in the southern hemisphere. Brandt has described the first time he dived to survey the location: he did not understand, until then, how much damage a cyclone could inflict below the surface. The broken coral becomes an underwater stage, and it matters that it was broken.

Air bubbles trail up from the faces in each frame. It is the only movement. The subjects are representatives of the many people in the South Pacific whose homes and land will be lost to rising oceans in the coming decades. They do not look panicked. They look composed, which is the point: the catastrophe is quiet.

Zoë Lescaze contributes the essay; the book was edited by Nadine Barth, who has worked with Brandt across the series. Taken alongside Chapter One (Zimbabwe and Kenya, 2021) and Chapter Two (Bolivia, 2023), SINK / RISE completes a trilogy that stands among the more coherent bodies of work in contemporary environmental photography.

The square format suits the compositions exactly. Ocean fills all four sides of the frame. A smaller print would lose the detail in the coral and the expression in the faces.