later that night
I held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.
—Warsan Shire (What They Did Yesterday Afternoon)

Unpackage.

Unwrap.

Pick a print.

Look.

And

. . .

. . . silence.

And.

. . .

Wonder :

Mise-en-scène.

Some of Brandt’s nonhuman subjects have been abandoned, or so injured that they cannot survive in the wilderness without human aid. Wardens and guardians are not revealed in Brandt’s tableaux. His subjects, though, earth’s rare exiles, inhabit transition-zone spaces. They are inbetween beings. No one place or time is attached to their lives.

The seeming paralysis and opportunism of local and global institutions that purport to serve and support the planet’s exiles, including Brandt’s subjects, is disturbing. We are a species that chooses to skirt the edges of what should have been an urgent and collaborative call to action: to fully enter the urgent work of salvaging our home, the earth. Just in case anyone is still clinging to the delusion that existential anguish is assigned only to designated “others,” a very public and disruptive message was given to humanity by the Covid-19 visitation. The lesson is simple: fate is fair in its distribution of sorrow and suffering. It is therefore in all our interests to mitigate these, wherever these might unfold.

Fortunately for the earth, its harbingers are here. They are pronouncing messages in many ways—in science, song, literature, and art—in photography, like Nick Brandt. They desperately hope that humans can rouse itself and marshal a will to pull back from the chasm.

III

The Wikipedia entry for England-born Nick Brandt indicates that his “photographic themes always relate to the disappearing natural world, before much of it is destroyed by mankind.” For a while, Nick Brandt lived a different kind of life, before choosing to focus on his photography as, primarily, a witness to and activist for the earth’s losses.

In our first conversation, occurring under a pandemic-amplified awareness of our finitude and fears, Nick reiterated his desperate concerns about our planet today. He admits to a diminishing hope that humans might snap awake to the implications of our earth’s retreat. In listening to Nick, one is alerted to the sense of the weight of the burden of what he has taken on. I ask about his dramatic and poignant images and his interpretations of the theme that motivates him. When he speaks about his art, his method, and process, the subjects and moments, his voice changes. Now there is a spark of excitement. In his timbre of voice, the listener can discern, without letting him know, the whisper of . . . hope.

Henry David Thoreau once exclaimed about the gloriousness of an ability by some “to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. . . . To affect the quality of the day. ” “High art,” he proclaimed it. Immersed in contemplation of Nick Brandt’s work, the viewer experiences an inkling of whatever emotion stirred Thoreau in his works, which boldly endeavors to affect the quality of the earth itself.

Dialoguing with the art: the subjects of the photographs look through and into our present. Spaces merge at some point. One enters their stillness, their waiting, their dignified hauntedness. It is impossible to remain untouched by this elegy to a decaying earth, to its tragic beauty. There is no defense against breaking hearts.

Palpability. Tangibility. Dimensionality.
I am tempted to do so, therefore I inhale one of the prints looking for a scent of its earth. I press my fingers into the paper, imagining that it might give way into the world that Brandt has imagined and crafted with light and fog.

Nostalgia; tizita, in Amharic.
A yearning for what might have been, what could have been stopped; sorrow and empathy for what has happened to the subjects, to the earth, and us. A closeup gaze at the forms and shapes that human inhospitableness to nature and other humans take. Averting the gaze is also a component of the viewing experience of these, Brandt’s unflinching witnesses. There is also a sense that we are glimpsing aspects of the future of our spirits. Spaces for questioning unfold. Nick Brandt, willfully, or not, seduces his viewer into an aesthetic experience that disrupts familiar boundaries, that muddies the dichotomy between viewer and artwork. The viewer encounters the work as an oddly recognizable dreamplace that also unsettles the mind, body, soul; emotions; senses; imagination. Here are landscapes that deliver direct to the soul a sense of the imminence of planetary losses of catastrophic proportions. The works convey an exquisite melancholy, such a sense of our exile from an earth to which we belong.

(For the record, it has been an eon, and then some, since I experienced contemporary photographs of peoples of African roots created by a person of Euro-American origins that were this tender, human, and gorgeous. It has been eons. And the evidence of Brandt’s heartfulness is in the immensity of the universal beauty that his work evokes.)

IV

The Day May Break series is like snapshots from a time-transcending fantasy epic without a Hollywood-esque resolution. They are surreal without the need for surrealism’s absurdity. There is also a subliminal resonance that the subjects convey; the tragedies they wear in their spirits, tragedies which can almost be scented. The world-weariness (Weltschmerz) in the demeanor of the subjects is like a faded and decaying cloak they wore long ago and stopped thinking about. It is only the stranger, the outsider who notices the nature of the shroud.

There is something of the old-style studio photography in the solemn placements, the simple props used to create scenes, the clothes worn, the monochromatic outcomes. Brandt’s subjects—human and animal—also meet their photographer, dignified and unsmiling, just as the occasion demands. The photographer’s elements have assembled subjects and led them into multiple spaces that they inhabit at once, and together.

There is the space where the subjects seem to be disconnected as if they are in parallel worlds that have ever so briefly converged. There is yet another space that offers the sense of an interspecies rendezvous at migratory crossroads as a consequence of some unknown crisis, or being at the midpoint of an odyssey of mythic scope.

Some of the images suggest a caravan (of earth beings) crossing the immense byways of the planet with no sense of destination; there is a mystical order to unknowing. We see moments where the subjects also seem to share a telepathic connection, soft entanglements. The viewer senses that this connectedness is quite in order. Older stories in human culture still carry hints of a different way of being in the world—one that was integrated, and framed by intricate connections with, and relationships to a nature that also had agency, whose voice could be heard and echoed.

Immersed in the experience of Brandt’s series, what begins to feel alien is living a life that is amputated from nature, as if one is not a part of it. What feels strange is a humanity that treats nature as abstract, as a concept.

Melancholic space-time: the what-might-have-been looks back at the viewer.

Brandt’s juxtaposition of subjects points to the axis of connection, community, and relationship; it is a profound wound. Although there is sorrow, there is also some sort of light shining through. What it is and what it means, the viewer is likely to mull over for a long time. Right now, what is clear, given the state of our intricate human interconnections with the earth and life, is that although the links are frayed and sometimes forgotten, they do endure. Although the future is bedimmed, it is still salvageable.

The artist has played a trick on the viewer. It as if he has reached into the past and manipulated Earth events that already inhabit the planet’s future. The effect is a sensation of viewing alternate dimensions where ideas, elements, and forces converge to generate a multidimensional story of infinite and sorrowful beauty, of warning and concern.

Tizita is an Amharic word for the kind of sense and emotion that goes a little beyond the pathos of things experienced in the now. Tizita is to allow a melancholic yearning and nostalgia for a future that might or might not unfold, although it would be most transcendent if it were already here. A mood. Intimations of an unfinished homecoming. Mystical, mythical mise-en-scène. Landscapes of possibility subsumed into beingness. Worlds shrouded in fog. The blurring of time, space, and place. Slipping into inbetweenness, threshold country.

In these notions, as with these images, there is the most resonant evocation to Lacrimae rerum, the tears of things. The Japanese literary culture encapsulates it best, at least for now: ????, ??????, Mono no aware.

This has been translated into, among other phrases, the pathos of things, in other words, an empathetic wistfulness for the ephemerality of the things of life. This awareness also yields consciousness of the beauty of the transient subject or object, and because of this, sadness (grief) enters the moment of encounter.

Mono no aware: it is a vein in these works. Their ascetic melancholy yields a haunting sense of needless loss that hovers over the subjects. The loss hovers over us, the viewers too. We “hear” their message, we “read” their news.

Nick Brandt and I speak again. It is a lengthy Zoom exchange and a nod to our present times. I tell him that his vulnerability to beauty soothes his rage at humanity and appeases his grief for Earth; that despite his protestations against human heedlessness, and his avowed pessimism and grumpiness, his work shows that he does love the earth and its people.

Hearing Brandt, while also looking at the prints laid out around me are two different experiences. Dichotomies. The words, the works; the artist ecstatic about his process, the discontented activist perplexed by general human nonchalance about the state of things in the world. Two fractious old-world prophets come to mind: Jeremiah, from whom we derive the noun ‘Jeremiad’, and whale-sheltered Jonah still hoping for the destruction of wicked humanity, but instead by his words provoking the transformation that humanity needed, much to his chagrin. We could hope.

V

Fog. (Noun.) Mist. Haar. Haze. Brume. Daze. Trance: state of disorientation, ambiguity. In Brandt’s work, fog turns substance into silhouette. Borrowing the words of the primordial Creator from the Book of Genesis, it is good—the suggestiveness that extends the viewer’s interaction/dialogue/debate with the image—that is good. Fog and uncertainty are good.

In this work, the politics projected upon the living body dissipates, and the shape in the picture becomes that of Everyone/Anyone. It is also, therefore, familiar. In some of the works, it goes further and presumes intimacy, a signal to the interiority that Brandt’s work stirs.

Here too, are the shards of a sociopolitical impulse. The works “speak to” an older, mystical way of engaging with the Earth. Brandt’s series offers a respite from the desensitization of a world conceding to modern technology and living mostly “virtual” lives. One delights in Brandt’s (inadvertent) buttressing of the mystery, wonder and hauntedness of life. He offers us a beautiful lament, that halfway resolves itself by becoming a poem, of the variety that fuels deep songs.

Contemplation: a fish eagle’s dreaming. A nod to a woman who is as brown as the soil of the earth and is wrapped in a floral leso, who rises from misted grounds and is one of the things—possibly—that lurk in the water. Here, we recognize that the spirits of nature are not as distant, arcane, or other to the reality of our living, and that the art of dreaming is not only the preserve of humans.

VI

“Is the song singing you?” Van Morrison once asked.

Brandt had been telling me how in seeking “to capture the essence, the spirit of the work . . . I found it liberating . . . to enter into this process completely open . . . vulnerable . . . you couldn’t tell who was going to have the indefinable connection with which animal. I found it refreshing. I found it a joy knowing that I could work in such a spontaneous way.”

Brandt had gathered the elements in one place and proceeded to wait, without planning and plotting for the right combination of forces to move him to depress his camera’s button. A self-described “control freak,” Brandt now revels in the wonder of his spontaneous cocreating with the forces of the unknown, his relinquishing old precisions to a repository of uncertainties.

Did he have a name for this experience?

“Yarragh?” Nick Brandt wondered. (He is also a Van Morrison fan from the early Astral Weeks and Saint Dominic’s Preview era.) Yarragh is a Gaelic word, purportedly highlighted by William Butler Yeats to refer to a cry-of-the-heart element in some Irish music. Amplified by, among others, Greil Marcus in his study of Van Morrison When That Rough God Goes Riding, it is an ineffable notion that has counterparts in the world.

There is another word used among Africa’s Luo nations to explain a spontaneous, and even ecstatic convergence of creative forces in a human being. It is juogi. It encompasses nature and all existence, for it derives its core impulse from a pantheon of good and hearty ancestors. It can neither be summoned, nor are its effects assured. Juogi can only guarantee the unexpected when it pierces a creator’s soul. Like Brandt, juogi can gather the elements of earth’s anguish to transmute these into a beauty that transforms.

Juogi.

VII

Brandt’s austere, yet lyrical witness to the state of the earth, to humanity’s choices, and the effects of humanity’s devastation of nature unsettles. He is the artist and witness who seizes portions of the bleakness, of desperate fates and by some mystery and alchemy, transmutes these into a gesture of such poignant and painful beauty. A master sculptor of slivers of the world as it is now, as it might or will be, as what might have been.

This is the first of a series that will cover the world. And it is appropriate that it is the apocalyptic time of the pandemic that drove Brandt to start his project on East and Southern Africa, a site of human origins where the vestiges of Eden cling.

Brandt upends many tropes in his poesis, in the choices he makes in his compositions: his filmic vernacular, the juxtapositions, the fog he uses to erase space, time, and place specificity; the rhythm, the sensuous textures, the multi-sensory evocations all work to overturn the stereotypes embedded among certain conservation and environmental institutions who regard human-nature wilderness-animal symbiosis as anathema, who treat certain kinds of humans presences as inimical to nature’s flourishing.

Brandt’s visual study shows his subjects pausing in the frame, and some, the women in particular, do so as if they are stealing moments of rare rest. The scenes reveal a quietly riveting communion, just before the subjects will set off again into the unknown, either alone or along tracks, and lives that will run parallel to each other.

Pathos. Here also is a panegyric to the sad impermanence of the things of life. Light and Dark: shrouds of old violence on bodies and spaces, but then again, here too is the evidence of a sublime tenderness and empathy, and the rightness of interspecies coexistence. The subjects of Brandt’s earth and art, and we, the viewers, hear the echoes from time approach us with questions about our duty of care to our planet, our home.

In contrast to Nick Brandt’s other environmentally inspired works, This Empty World and Inherit the Dust, The Day May Break dives into a layer of a profoundly beautiful unknown. It is a gloaming replete with stillness and silences that also feel intimate.

Brandt’s art offers the viewer a fresh way of experiencing and feeling the earth. His subject choices make his case for nature, the environment, humanity, and the present and future. Brandt’s work is such an elegiac ode to our earth hours, a sonorous cry for an idyll deflowered, literally and figuratively. In these, we may even recognize the shape that our transience takes, transience and bleak beauty, both, all, and everything at once.

A final word.

A delicate one.

One as ephemeral as a sigh:
Sillage | si?'j??? | “trail of scent that lingers behind from perfume, the degree to which a perfume’s fragrance lingers in the air when worn.” It can also refer to the trail left by a boat on a water surface. After inhaling aspects of Nick Brandt’s The Day May Break series for the better part of three days, I put them away. A sorrowful enchantment persists. There are memories of what has been seen that leaches into a dream. I remember faces and shapes and the feel. I see again, the fierce and uncompromising eyes of Brandt’s straight-backed women.

Nick Brandt has delivered, again, an eloquent testament for earth, that is interwoven with compassion. This monochromatic anthem for the planet and Life (with capital L) will have a long, long resonance in the world. Yes, the series is uncompromising, yet it equally affirms that our scarred, sorrowing earth is not doomed. A viewer of these works may exhale, and then sneak hold of one of Brandt’s ephemeral shards, one of those made from yearning that cuts through fear and fury, doubt and despair, which murmur into a listening heart (but ever so faintly) that beauty has not yet abandoned earth.