With The Echo of Our Voices (Skira Editore, September 2025), Nick Brandt continues his epic and urgent global series The Day May Break. Following chapters created in Kenya and Zimbabwe, Bolivia, and Fiji, this fourth installment was photographed in Jordan’s Wadi Rum, one of the most water-scarce places on Earth. Here, Brandt portrays displaced Syrian families as “human islands” — at once metaphors of resilience in an unforgiving landscape and emblems of those least responsible yet most affected by climate breakdown.
I have followed Nick’s work for many years, and what has always struck me is his ability to combine allegory and testimony, grief and dignity, without ever losing sight of the human and animal beings at the heart of his photographs. In this new chapter, the balance between absence and presence, between loss and resilience, feels especially poignant. Our conversation touches on beauty and ethics, temporality and metaphor, the ethics of representation, and the responsibilities of artists confronting the intersection of war, displacement, and climate crisis.
There has long been a theoretical debate — from Sontag to Linfield — around whether beauty in images of suffering risks aestheticizing pain, or whether it can in fact deepen our ethical engagement. Personally, I think this is an old prejudice: ethics and aesthetics go hand in hand, and beauty can be profoundly ethical. How do you see the role of beauty in art that grapples with crisis?
It’s an important question, Alessia. And I think it’s a fine balance.
If I initially answer your question in relation to my work: personally, in my work, I am not consciously seeking out beauty in the photos, but as a result of the elements that I work with - the fog, the soft light, the subjects underwater, the sculptural ‘human islands, the desert, the black and white - all these elements can perhaps inevitably contribute to an aesthetic beauty.
Of course, these photographs are not images of crisis in the photos themselves - but portraits of people and animals who have been through traumatic experiences.
By the way, in relation to any notional beauty in my photos, I think it s part of the same reason that there is a sense of calm in all the photos:
I think that it s my way of wanting to find something to emotionally grasp onto within the darkness and chaos. I see the current state of the world in increasingly bleak terms, and I think perhaps that a sense of calm and notional beauty within the photos acts as a kind of spiritual tonic for me. I need to ask my therapist and see if she agrees with my hypothesis.
And then of course, there are the people and animals in the photos, who in Chapters One, Two and Four (Kenya and Zimbabwe, Bolivia and Syrians in Jordan) have all been through trauma due to the impacts of climate change.
But I would hope that a viewer of the prints sees them as presented with respect and dignity. I know that all the people themselves feel that they have been.
But if we now think about other photographers’ images of crisis that are in addition undeniably beautiful, the question for me is then, does that beauty draw in the viewer more to the image? Does it intrigue them, and ultimately, therefore, move them. A case by case basis, surely.
Looking at your series, I often feel they oscillate between testimony and dream. Do you think of your photographs as evidence, as allegory, or as something in between?
I would like to think that each chapter in its own way is all of the above. In The Day May Break, Chapters One and Two, the fog on location, partially obscuring the animals in the background, aims to be symbolic of the natural world that we once knew rapidly disappearing from view.
I mean, if we just take one photo from SINK / RISE, Chapter Three, of Onnie and Keanan, photographed underwater on a home-made seesaw, in Fiji.
For me, Onnie and Keanan on Seesaw is about a sense of loss for these children’s future. What should be the innocence of childhood is replaced by something foreboding.
For me, Keanan, the boy, his head down, is using his weight to lift Onnie up toward the surface, towards the light and land. She faces up, into the future, with perhaps a tentative sense of hope tempered with anxiety of what lies ahead?
Across The Day May Break, time is layered — the past of loss, the present of survival, and the looming future of crisis. In The Echo of Our Voices, the idea of “human islands” in Wadi Rum seems to stage the future before it happens. How do you think about temporality in your practice? Are your images elegies, warnings, or seeds of possible futures?
I hope that, again, they are very much all those things. Elegies for current and past damaged and destroyed lives, for a planet that once was, warnings of what is still to come, and by virtue of the fact that these people and animals are survivors, seeds of future possibility.
By the way, your description of layered time is perfectly articulated. But I would say that in SINK / RISE, Chapter Three, of Fijian people photographed underwater, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, most suggests a future before it happens. A kind of pre-apocalypse.
And yes, the sometimes terrifying impermanence of it all, the increasing lack of any kind of future stability of life on the planet that alarms so many of us, is a very important element.
The metaphor of people as “human islands” is both visual and conceptual. How do you balance metaphor with the material reality of the landscapes you photograph? Do you ever worry that metaphor can obscure as much as it illuminates?
Well, I am an obsessive worrier about most things in my life, but in this instance, when creating, I operate on instinct. I’m not thinking about how other people may interpret the images. I’m expressing my concerns about the environmental injustice I see in the world, and if others also see this, great. But I just don’t spend time in the process of creation imagining how others might respond. I think in the process of creation, you can drive yourself crazy if you start second guessing others’ responses.
In your earlier works, animals often stood as elegiac presences for a vanishing natural world. In The Echo of Our Voices, displaced families inhabit that space of loss. How do you see the interplay between absence (of home, of habitat, of certainty) and presence (of human dignity, resilience, witness) evolving across your series?
With each body of work, I’m most influenced by how I am feeling in that period of time. As things seem to grow darker with each passing year, coming to The Echo of Our Voices at the end of 2023, I myself felt the need for a change of energy within the series.
So presence - a more tangible feeling of connection and resilience within an ever more fucked-up world - became much more important for me in this chapter. And fortunately, I think, the Syrian families I photographed were the right people to express this.
There was something about the Syrian families that drew me to them the most. Having fled the war in Syria in the years 2013–15, they are now living lives of continuous displacement due to climate change, forced to move up to several times a year, moving their tents to where there has been sufficient rainfall to enable crops to grow and for them to find temporary employment.
It’s a cycle with no end in sight while they live in Jordan. They themselves all see how dramatic the changes have been over the last decade, their lives so compromised by the dramatically diminished winter rains. As they said, water is life. And life is getting har.
These are people who lost their homes, their way of life, their communities, their land, everything. Now all they have is each other. It seems to have given them a strength and togetherness in the face of such adversity. There was, is, a grace and humility to them, that perhaps also made them connect more with the principle of the project
In working with displaced families, choreography and staging inevitably enter the frame. How do you negotiate agency with your subjects — ensuring that they are not only “portrayed” but also co-authors of their representation?
This is very important. I invited around seven families at a time to come stay with us in the desert for six-day weeks, as I like to spend time experimenting with how to photograph people. I’m not the kind of photographer who can take a compelling portrait of someone within 20 minutes. I wish I was, and I am very jealous of those who can. But it takes me time to get to know someone and begin to understand how to photograph them. Anyway, after each session, the families would climb down off the boxes and come over to look at some frames through the viewfinder. In this way, they understood how we were portraying them, and with each passing day, were able to contribute more to the choreography of how they presented themselves.
I know that they saw that they were being photographed with dignity and respect. I hope that I have served them well.
The Echo of Our Voices sits at the nexus of war, displacement, and climate breakdown — crises that overlap and amplify each other. How do you hold these dynamics together in your work without reducing one or the other?
As you say, a nexus of war, displacement, and climate breakdown. Again, I’m photographing portraits instinctually, to try and express what urgently moves me. So the questions then come after, in the choice of images, how a balance is struck. But ultimately these are portraits of the human condition. Even The Cave, a panoramic frieze-like image featuring 28 Syrian refugees connected within a long cave in the desert, for me, is a portrait.
When viewers stand in front of your photographs, what do you hope will happen inside them? Beyond empathy, do you imagine your images provoking responsibility, action, or even discomfort?
In an ideal world, all of the above. If one can provoke responsibility and action that is quite an achievement, and I have no idea how much impact the work has on people. For me, its always been that you do what you do, and if you can be even an incremental wheel in the cogs of change, of enlightenment and awareness, then that’s good.
But for me the only way the images will stand a chance of provoking much depth is when viewers stand in front of the prints - and thank you for mentioning that way of viewing. I know that these images when viewed tiny on a damned phone is a lost cause. For me, the work is about the expressions on peoples faces which you can only see properly when viewing the prints, and to some degree, the large format book.
But to get back to responsibility and action, there’s something that I talk about more and more these days. That we need to try to be good ancestors, to be better ancestors, that we need to tread as lightly on the planet as we can, to consider the environmental impact that our actions will have on future generations, on those billions of humans, animals and trees that we will never live to see.
The title The Echo of Our Voices suggests reverberations — something heard yet distant, something both present and absent. What role does silence, or the unsaid, play in your images? What do you leave to imagination, and why?
Well, the trauma of the people is ‘off-camera’, isn’t it. Their destroyed homes in another country, their laboring in other peoples’ fields, their struggle as refugees. What remains visible is their simply ‘being’. Their connection. But within that, I hope that you still understand that for them to be on these islands, as strong as they are, they are also perhaps a kind of life raft in a harsh world.
So yes, I prefer leaving much to the viewers’ imagination. I’m choosing not to photograph the families’ laboring in the fields, for example.
And then, as I mentioned earlier, I think I’m looking for a sense of calm within the chaos for myself as well. A way to stay sane.
The series as a whole is titled The Day May Break. Is the “break” a fracture, a collapse, or a dawn? Now that you’ve completed four chapters — Kenya/Zimbabwe, Bolivia, Fiji, Jordan — what does that break mean to you today? And do you see signs of dawn, anywhere, still?
It does seem to be getting darker and darker, doesn t it? The day breaking - as in the earth shattering - seems to currently be overwhelming the other meaning of daybreak, as a kind of dawn coming.
But if I may refer to one of my favorite quoted phrases: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
In my head, analyzing the path that humanity is taking, I can only view our future with an exhausted pessimism and anxiety. But while my heart beats, it beats with a refusal to surrender. It beats with the belief, clichéd though it may be, that it is always important to fight on. Our desire and will can overcome much while there is still hope and possibility.
Speaking with Nick, I was reminded that his work is never only about catastrophe. Across four chapters and continents, The Day May Break has become a meditation on our fragile present and imperiled future — a work that is at once elegy, warning, and fragile promise. The Echo of Our Voices deepens this trajectory, shifting the focus toward human resilience in the face of loss, and toward the reverberations — the echoes — of stories that must be heard.
This autumn, the work will be exhibited at Hangar Art Center in Brussels, offering viewers the chance to encounter these images on the scale they demand — prints that reveal every nuance of expression and gesture. For me, what resonates most is Nick’s insistence that while the day may break as fracture and collapse, it can also break as dawn. His images remind us that we still have the capacity — and the responsibility — to be better ancestors, to hold on to hope, and to fight on.
