subjects’ expressions will change like water. Stoicism becomes resignation. Frustration becomes resolve. In their faces, we can read tenderness, grief, and perseverance. Intimate and spare as these portraits are, the effect is expansive. 

Brandt auditioned roughly two hundred people for the project but ultimately worked with only a dozen. It just so happened that the best subjects he found, the rare individuals who were able to pose comfortably underwater, were nearly all under eighteen. As the photographer points out, their age necessarily evokes the future. When I asked him whether he gave his young collaborators instructions on how to use the props, where to look, or how to interact with one another, Brandt demurred. What people do on their own, he says, is always more interesting than what he might impose. Knowing that his models could have posed a million different ways makes their chosen gestures that much more profound. In a couple photos, Serafina holds her younger brother, Keanan, in a protective embrace. In Ben and His Father Viti, Fiji (2023), an adult son rests a reassuring hand on his father’s shoulder. The older man bows his head, seemingly overcome by shame or regret.

Humble as he may be about his role in these hypnotic scenes, Brandt has an obvious talent for fostering the pensive, private moments and complex interactions that unfold in his photographs. SINK / RISE is the third chapter of The Day May Break, an ongoing series addressing environmental degradation, and the previous chapters similarly testify to his ability to forge these connections no matter where he is. The other chapters depict people in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Bolivia who have lost their homes, livelihoods, and loved ones in droughts, cyclones, and other weather events associated with climate change. These men, women, and children share the frame with nonhuman animals who have been orphaned or displaced by poaching and habitat loss, and now live in nature preserves. 

Brandt’s empathy suffuses these photographs. He declines commercial assignments as a rule because he seriously doubts that he could take a decent picture of someone whose story did not seem in urgent need of telling. A sense of injustice, he told me, is what drives his practice. In the images themselves, Brandt keeps the viewer’s attention dialed in on his subjects and their stories. Despite the surreal, semi-theatrical settings in which these portraits are staged, Brandt’s images are direct, uncluttered, and free from distractions. This combination of fantasy and restraint is a signature of Brandt’s work rarely seen elsewhere.

SINK / RISE shares obvious formal and thematic elements with the previous chapters of The Day May Break, but it also departs from his past work in significant ways. First off, the portraits are in color. Brandt originally planned to print SINK / RISE in the same black and white palette as the previous chapters, but he changed his mind when his assistants noticed that, without the flowing hair and billowing fabric one would expect to see underwater, the casual observer flip (or worse, scroll) through the series and assume it was shot on land. In black and white, the images were “really beautiful, like nineteenth-century studio photography, like Julia Margaret Cameron underwater,” said Brandt, who floated screens on the surface above his subjects to soften and diffuse the light. “But you couldn’t tell it was underwater.” The Pacific blue makes the extraordinary setting of these portraits clear, but the use of color also serves the series on a conceptual level. Whereas the black and white palette of previous chapters suited the elegiac portrayal of endangered species fading into memory and portraits of people haunted by the past, the color in SINK/RISE subtly orients this chapter toward the future.

Unlike the climate refugees Brandt photographed in the previous chapters of The Day May Break, individuals who have already suffered extreme loss, the Fijian locals in SINK / RISE have yet to experience the dramatic changes to their coastlines rising sea levels are expected to cause by the end of the century. By photographing his subjects underwater, evoking a moment when climate projections have indeed become a reality, Brandt is effectively staging these scenes in an unrealized world to come. A complex, temporal layering occurs within in each photograph as a result: these are simulations of the future that nonetheless depict real people alive today with past experiences that necessarily inform the way pose. 

In the double portrait Akessa and Maria, Fiji (2023), for instance, Akessa looks down with knitted brows, as though she is reliving a painful memory. These transporting images possess the sublime qualities the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson sought in ruins: “Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings,” he wrote.^[1] Brandt’s photographs conjure expanses of time and space, lifting us beyond ourselves.

By playing with time as deftly as he has, Brandt has also managed to overcome the tremendous obstacles in depicting a crisis moving at a pace too subtle for most people to observe. Although sea levels are advancing at an alarming rate rapid by any scientific standard, the water is rising in slow motion compared to mythic floods that drown the world in a matter of a days. We humans struggle to register emergencies that lack the drama of the tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions in Hollywood disaster movies. Some photographers have responded to this dilemma by shooting climactic scenes of colossal, calving icebergs or by documenting the retreat of specific glaciers over the course of decades. Well-intentioned as these images are, they necessarily leave out the human experience of rising seas. As the most psychologically and emotionally gripping depictions of the biblical Deluge suggest, it is through human stories that we can grasp crises otherwise too vast to comprehend. With the portraits in SINK / RISE, Brandt gives us a vital means of considering what we all stand to lose.   

And yet, even as he depicts people in the crosshairs of climate change, Brandt does not portray his subjects as one-dimensional victims or martyrs. They appear as complete human beings, individuals whose identities are not reducible to their circumstances. Although it might be tempting to try and convey the magnitude of the crisis through enormous prints, Brandt has shrewdly recognized that the immediacy of these images is partly what gives them their singular power. The photographs comprising SINK / RISE are remarkable in their ability to be simultaneously approachable and enigmatic, to be political and inclusive. They invite us to linger, to look harder, and to go deeper. With every return, there is something new to discover— within the images or within us.

“When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future,” observes the writer Christopher Woodward. Pondering the wreckage of the past, he says, it’s easy to feel an overwhelming sense of pointlessness. “To statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and…to a painter or architect, the fragments of a stupendous antiquity call into question the purpose of their art. Why struggle with a brush or chisel to create the beauty of wholeness when far greater works have been destroyed by Time?”^[2] Contemplating the ruins of an unrealized future might just have the opposite effect. Instead of confirming our powerlessness, Brandt’s visions of a world underwater remind us why we fight. 

^[1] Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 124. 

^[2] Christopher Woodward, In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art, and Literature (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 2-3.

MIKA, FIJI, 2023