"Devastating effects of climate change” explored in Petworth exhibition

Nicola Jones​​​​, gallery chief executive, said: “Nick Brandt’s The Day May Break: Chapters One to Three explores themes of environmental destruction and climate change. With a strong focus on the global rising sea levels and its devastating legacy, Brandt’s newest chapter, SINK/RISE, features haunting scenes captured underwater off the coast of the Fijian islands in 2023. The series will be exhibited for the first time globally at Newlands House Gallery until May 29.

“SINK/RISE focuses on South Pacific Islanders impacted by rising oceans as a result from climate change. In this series, Brandt showcases the devastation through symbolic images. The local inhabitants featured in the images are representatives of the many people whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades as the water levels continue to rise.

“Completing the exhibition, Chapters One and Two, photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in 2020, and Bolivia in 2022, chronicle the stories of the people who have been dramatically impacted by climate change – some displaced by cyclones that destroyed their homes and others displaced and impoverished by severe droughts. Depicting humans and animals photographed in the same frame at sanctuaries and conservancies, the images suggest the subjects' shared experience of navigating a rapidly degrading natural world. Nick Brandt’s photographs in The Day May Break: Chapters One to Three aim to jolt the viewer out of complacency, as communities around the world struggle to adapt.”

Nick Brandt was born and raised in London where he originally studied painting and film at Central St Martins School of Art. In the early 2000s he switched careers from directing to photography in order to express his feelings about the impact of mankind’s destruction of the natural world and on humans themselves. In 2010, Brandt co-founded Big Life Foundation, a non-profit in Keny/Tanzania that employs more than 300 local rangers protecting 1.6 million acres of the Amboseli/Kilimanjaro ecosystem. Nick has been featured in multiple exhibitions in galleries and museums around the globe including at Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm, Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, Multimedia Museum of Art in Moscow, and Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York and Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. Nick lives in the mountains of southern California.

Zoe Lescaze, author of Paleoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past, said: “Nick Brandt has created a profoundly original body of work, one that represents an entirely new approach to climate-conscious photography. Although they are several meters below the surface, the subjects of Brandt’s mesmerising photographs do not float or swim. Incredibly, they sit on sofas, stand on chairs, use seesaws and pose in ways they might on land. The effect is otherworldly as though the familiar laws of physics have stalled.”