The Day May Break: Chapters One, Two, and Three

Nick Brandt began this series in late 2020, photographing in Zimbabwe and Kenya. The concept is precise: people displaced by climate-driven floods and droughts, and rescued animals that cannot be returned to the wild, brought together in a single large-format frame. Industrial fog machines deployed on location unify each image in a shared atmosphere. The fog reads simultaneously as environmental metaphor and as the smoke from wildfires that has become a fixture of the contemporary landscape.

Chapter Two moved to Bolivia, to the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary, where Brandt continued the same approach in 2022. Chapter Three, titled SINK/RISE, marks the sharpest formal break: Brandt photographed South Pacific Islanders underwater, off the coast of Vanua Levu, Fiji, in 2023. He shot entirely in-camera, using a 4×4-metre silk frame at the surface to manage the light. Subjects hold their breath, seated at tables or standing on chairs on the ocean floor. The coral around them was already bleached and broken. This chapter introduces colour for the first time in the series: a muted blue-green that reads as disturbance rather than beauty.

The boxed set gathers all three volumes under one cover. Each runs to square format at roughly 310–330mm, substantial enough to hold a double-page spread without compression. Text from Zoë Lescaze, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Percival Everett and Daniel Sherrell provides context across ecological and political registers. Brandt co-founded Big Life Foundation in 2010, an organisation employing more than 300 local rangers protecting 1.6 million acres of the Amboseli–Kilimanjaro ecosystem. That fact is not incidental to the work; it is the condition of it.