There are the brothers, Samuel and Adolfo, who worked for decades at Bolivia's only ski resort and watched the glacier disappear year by year, until the world's highest ski slope was just a dry stone ridge and they retreated down the mountain where they struggled to find jobs, Samuel scraping by on his wife's modest income and returning every so often to the abandoned summit lodge, to remember what it'd looked like in the snow. Next to them is Taika, an exile of similar age and unknown origin, whose kin were rounded up to eat or to pet, who carries his load on his back.

There is Chascas, who was kidnapped, who saw her mother killed, whose brother died falling from a branch, who struggled with nightmares for years after being rescued, who would wake up screaming every night. Seated behind her is Lucio, who saw his livestock swept away in floods of unprecedented scale, his crops buried under sand and gravel, his entire community suddenly impoverished, Lucio who still holds out hope that a retaining wall might contain the rising river, even as his neighbors abandon their farms.

Some of these subjects are humans, some are animals, but to a fault they are people - creatures of equal and obvious personhood. Each has arrived at the shoot through their own cascade of tragedy. Ecological to economic to familial catastrophe, an impossible string of what was once called bad luck. But as the world heats up, as the weather rebels, as ecosystems fall like embattled cities, large swaths of people on this planet—human and animal both—have seen the winds of luck shift. Clear pictures are less and less possible. Fog comes wafting through the frame.

But Carmen, and Zosa, and Samuel, and Adolfo, and Taika, and Chasca, and Lucio, and Hisca, and Calixto, and Tarkus, and Clementina, and Florentino, and Marisol, and Ilaria, and Lineth, and Tricia, and Kaa, and Jhancarla, and Juana, and Jaime, and Jame, and Hob, and Ruth, and Luis, and Ajayu, and Apthapi, and Echo, and Arco, and Luca, and Vicente, and Valeriano, and Pimienta, and Nayra, and Silala, and Eustaquia, and Hernak, and Lari, and Capy, and Kini. 

These are not mere symbols, deployed to drive a point. They are people. They have histories, shaped by but not reducible to the crises they have survived. They have stepped out from behind the veil of suffering, that vague, enormous, regrettable thing that is happening elsewhere, all the time, to people you don't know. The Day May Break asks you to know them. These specific people. Say their names one by one. Try in vain to meet their gaze.

You can't, for the most part. Their eyes evade yours, though you will them to lock. This is what's remarkable about Nick Brandt's photographs. A lesser artist would have adjusted their gaze to meet the reader's, would have made these images about the reader, in the way that pictures of hardship are so often extracted from the Global South to provide coffee table catharses in the north. Looking through the images, I found myself straining toward this expectation, wanting the subjects to meet my eye so I could feel indicted and therefore cleansed. 

I wanted, furthermore, to force the men who had shattered these lives to bear witness to the fragments. The fossil fuel executives, the hedge-fund managers, the corrupt politicians, the coal barons: all the hollow men who mistake their power for personhood, who fill their emptiness by devouring the world. I picture Mitch McConnell finally cracking under the gaze of a tapir, a macaw, an eight-year-old girl.

But neither Aptaphi, Arco Iris, Jhancarla, or any of the other people that Brandt photographs are really looking at the viewer. Their gaze rests on the ground, or outside the frame, or on the horizon. Even when it catches the camera, it looks beyond whoever's behind it, noting them briefly, perhaps with regret, before moving on into the mist. Above all, their gaze seems directed inward, toward a private space the camera cannot reach. They wear expressions of dignity and fatigue, sadness and equanimity, possibility and nostalgia, anger and its opposite. They look through their audience and into the smoke that surrounds them, illuminated occasionally by a light bulb.

The overwhelming sense is that these are people figuring out how to live in a new world. They are not here to help us achieve clarity. They are too busy finding it for themselves. In that private space the camera can't see—the space we might call a soul—they are marshaling enormous resources, weaving new meanings, finding new fortitudes and solidarities. These are, after all, interspecific family portraits, posed with the same warmth, deliberation, and occasional awkwardness. Here are chosen families, thrown together by hardship, doing the difficult work we will all need to embark on if we want to survive what's coming.

To imagine these as images of a vanishing world misses the point entirely. It is our world that is vanishing, while theirs comes more fully into view. The terrain is bleak, but Nick Brandt's subjects are pioneers, and we will follow them into the dust, learning once again how to live.

Every photograph is the beginning of a story.