Nick Brandt

My younger son informed me one day that he had been a tiger in India. Curious, I asked him, “How do you know?” “Sometimes on the soccer field,” he said, “I have a sudden access of grace and agility, like a tiger.” (He was about ten at the time but read beyond his years, and his memory was better than I’d supposed.) Athletes encounter such moments but seldom credit them to so close a relationship to our own animal nature. Most of us who do not live near wild animals like tigers—or lions, cheetahs, rhinoceroses—experience them primarily through photographs, and perhaps now and then on a trip to a zoo with a child in tow. Photography stokes and channels our fascination and wonder, our curiosity and response to whatever strikes us as exotic, our respect for fearsome power and our awe in the face of such strange beauties. And it reinforces a tendency, somewhat less vivid than my son’s, to compare and conflate ourselves to the animal kingdom, as in: Lion-hearted. Wolfish. Foxy.

Genesis promised us dominion over all of creation, but Africa’s large animals make that promise seem flimsy and rivet attention to nature’s mysterious and unbridled creativity. Early photographers recognized the monumental importance of such creatures but could do little about it other than photographing those that sat still in a zoo. Once film was fast enough, telephoto lenses precise enough and color film good enough, photographs of dangerous and elusive animals in their native habitats became a reliable and popular source of vicarious thrills.

Nick Brandt’s pictures present a more complex set of goals and achievements than the usual run of reports from the African wild. He is on firm footing in the areas of beauty, awe, and sympathy, and he navigates a sure course across the diverse regions of portraiture, emblem, environment, nostalgia, narrative, and entropy. To begin with, his images are quite beautiful, no mean feat but common enough in the genre. For some years, the art-photography world disdained beauty as an inferior approach, but wild animal photography, which generally appealed to a different audience and showed in different venues, was excused. Brandt’s large, soft-sepia-toned prints are designed for aesthetic consideration yet often bypass conventional and conventionally beautiful compositions. “Giraffes in Evening Light”, for instance, with one bold giraffe up front, has a row of stick-figure giraffes in the distance describing a rhythm so quirky and disconnected it looks like a John Cage score. Several pictures of giraffes are nearly as eccentric as the species itself: a lone giraffe off to one side in a halo of light as a dark sky moves in, a triptych of giraffes performing neck ballets. Giraffes appear to have an enviable tendency to blunder into sophisticated choreography.

Many pictures convey a rare sense of intimacy, as if Brandt knew the animals, had invited them to sit for his camera, and had a prime portraitist’s intuition of character. This is not to be confused with the illusion of the photographer’s closeness to skittish subjects, which is rife in African animal photography by virtue of telephoto lenses. Brandt doesn’t use one. He works with a medium format camera, and he waits with a zen-like patience for days, even weeks, to become an acceptable presence, to see the maddeningly persistent, clear blue skies do a favor to his photographs by subsiding into clouds, to spot some action or expression worth recording.

The results are portraits of wild animals as surely as Peter Hujar’s pictures of dogs and cows are portraits of domesticated ones. What’s unlikely, and exceptional, is that Brandt has not only, somehow, divined what read as incontrovertible elements of personality and emotion but also captured his subjects, which aren’t about to follow directions, when they slip into attitudes and positions as elegant as any arranged by Arnold Newman for his human high achievers.

It doesn’t require science to determine that animals have at least certain emotions. Besides, long before it was discovered that we have so many genes in common not only with chimps but with mice, humans everywhere tended to anthropomorphize animals, to judge their look and demeanor by what we believe we know about our own kind. Thus it is probably mere projection that finds Brandt’s elephants somber and melancholy, as if they were oppressed by their own wrinkles. A lion that leans his forehead down to his mate’s (“Lions Head to Head”) might only be insisting on his dominance, but it sure looks like affection or at least some kindly, husbandly communication. And Brandt’s photograph of two baboons (“Baboons in Profile”), one a mother with a baby burrowing into her breast and light cutting between the pair like a revelation, becomes an allegory of attachment, family, tenderness, and caring, with a hint of the attendant difficulties in the crown of thorns at the top.

Brandt’s staunch endurance and quick eye combine to produce emblems as well as personal portraits; at times they are one and the same. Animals in perfect profile, some as precisely reflected upside down in shallow water as figures on playing cards, would be ideal illustrations

A Shadow Falls, taken in its entirety, is a love story without a happily ever after. Generally speaking, it’s either love or hate that prompts such obsessive stalking as Brandt engages in, and hate doesn’t express itself so lyrically. The opening of the narrative is lush: an elephant swings across a forest floor where light beaming through a luxurious canopy of leaves falls upon him like a spotlight (“Elephant Cathedral”). What follows includes lakes and rivers, trees in backgrounds, leafy shelters for gorillas. Later, the lake beds dry up, giraffes cross a migration trail on parched land, elephants plod over what looks like a desert without sand. Two giraffes are undismayed by a twister in the distance; it’s a dust devil, one of many that rise off land in the dry season, more often since cattle grazing has caused vicious erosion. The devil, an ominous sign (if not to giraffes), looms like dark magic in a real-life Oz.

And at the end, at sunset, an abandoned ostrich egg lies on earth that has dried up and cracked open repeatedly, like a brittle piece of china, like a parable of the universe’s experiments with life, which did not succeed where there was no water. Perhaps it represents a planet expiring on hostile soil; Columbus, after all, demonstrated the earth’s roundness to doubters with an egg. However interpreted, the image speaks the language of death, a language easy to read. If humans are destroying the animals, for food, for fear, for greed, we are destroying the land for uncountable reasons, as efficient a way as many another to destroy animals—even when most of the shooting in the African wild these days is done with cameras. At any rate, the land, this earth, is all we have. The animals will go before we do; they haven’t our resources.

Brandt deals subtly with this prospect, not only in sequencing his pictures from abundance to desperation. The sepia tone of his prints instantly suggests nineteenth-century albumen prints, and he has purposely damaged several of them to give a feeling of age, as if we were looking at something that no longer exists: a predictive nostalgia. In this media age, when many are living parts of their lives in some version of virtual reality, the wild animals we reflexively admire or wonder at or stand in awe of could vanish and leave us only their shadowed images, as if they were dead movie stars.