Shared Fate: Nick Brandt's "The Day May Break" Series (2021–Present)

Most environmental photography places humans and nature in separate frames. Nick Brandt's ongoing series The Day May Break refuses that separation entirely. In these images, people and animals share the same space — not metaphorically, but literally, photographed together in the same frame at the same moment. A Kenyan family displaced by flooding stands in the fog alongside Najin, one of the last two northern white rhinos alive on Earth. A woman from Zimbabwe, who lost two young children to floodwaters, is photographed beside a rescued elephant. A farmer, impoverished and forced from his land by years of drought, sits quietly near a giraffe. The effect is arresting, otherworldly, and deeply deliberate. Brandt's central argument is simple and radical: the fate of humans and animals is not parallel — it is identical.

Brandt came to this project through decades of photographing the wildlife of East Africa, work that eventually became something closer to an extended elegy for a disappearing world. Beginning in 2020, he photographed The Day May Break in Zimbabwe and Kenya, and later Bolivia, Fiji, and Jordan, producing what has grown into an ongoing global series. The animals in the photographs are almost all long-term rescues — victims of poaching, habitat destruction, or wildlife trafficking who can never be released back into the wild and have therefore become habituated to human presence. This is not Photoshop: Brandt shoots the animals and the people together in real time, in the same location. The resulting images are often bathed in mist and fog — smoke, Brandt notes, from the ever-intensifying wildfires devastating habitats across the globe — which gives them a haunting, suspended quality, as if they exist just outside of ordinary time.

The human subjects in these photographs are not background figures. They are the point. Each person has been directly harmed by climate change: displaced by cyclones, bankrupted by drought, forced to watch their children swept away by flooding. Brandt has been unsparing in his identification of the injustice at the heart of the climate crisis — that the people photographed here, mostly rural, mostly poor, mostly from countries in the Global South, are among those who have contributed least to the carbon emissions driving the crisis, and yet are suffering the most acutely. As Brandt wrote in his essay accompanying the series: "People living in rural areas, especially those working on the land, are almost always the hardest hit by environmental degradation, due to the exhausted natural resources upon which they rely. The grim irony is that these people are among those who have the smallest environmental impact on the planet."

What distinguishes Brandt's work from the long tradition of environmental photography is this insistence on the moral and political dimension of the crisis. He is not documenting tragedy from a distance. He is making an argument — that the destruction of the natural world and the suffering of the most vulnerable humans are not separate issues to be addressed by separate movements, but a single catastrophe with a single set of causes. Photographic historian Philip Prodger described the series as "a landmark body of work by one of photography's great environmental champions," adding that Brandt "channels his outrage into quiet determination." That quiet is perhaps the most powerful thing about these images. They do not shout. They stare.

The title The Day May Break is deliberately ambiguous — as one critic observed, it poses a question the series never fully answers: will the day break like a sunrise, or like glass? Brandt himself offers no easy comfort, but he resists pure despair. The tenderness visible in each frame — the careful dignity afforded to both the human and animal subjects — implies that something is still worth fighting for. In a conversation about the series, Brandt said he hoped his work would remind viewers "that we need to be far better stewards of the earth. That we all need to learn to be good ancestors." Looking at these photographs — a woman and a rhino standing together in the mist, sharing a moment of utterly improbable proximity — it is hard not to feel the weight of that responsibility, and the terrible beauty of what we still have left to lose.