Nick Brandt. FATUMA, ALI AND BUPA, KENYA, 2020. Limited Edition.
FATUMA, ALI AND BUPA, KENYA, 2020, photographed together in the same frame.
About the Work
The Day May Break is an ongoing global series portraying people and animals that have been impacted by environmental degradation and destruction.
Chapter One was photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in 2020.
The people in the photos have all been badly affected by climate change, from extreme droughts to floods that destroyed their homes and livelihoods.
The photographs were taken at several sanctuaries and conservancies. The animals are almost all long-term rescues, victims of everything from habitat destruction to wildlife trafficking.
These animals can never be released back into the wild. As a result, they are almost all habituated to humans, and so it was safe for human strangers to be close to them, photographed in the same frame at the same time.
The fog is symbolic of a natural world now rapidly fading from view. Created by fog machines on location, it is also an echo of the smoke from wildfires, intensified by climate change, devastating so much of the planet.
However, in spite of their loss, these people and animals are the survivors. And therein still lies possibility.
Fatuma, Ali and Bupa
Fatuma & Ali lived as nomads with their livestock in Northeast Kenya. But from 2010, severe droughts killed all their goats and cows. Everyone fled the area, and a lot of people died. With little food available, Fatuma and Ali were forced to move to a town further south. They are still not able to go back home.
Bupa was 9 years old in 1989, when he was rescued from a mass elephant cull in Zimbabwe by the owner of Ol Jogii Conservancy in Kenya.
Bupa’s parents would have been killed in the culling. Once, there would have been no such thing as an “excess population” of elephants, because there would have been enough land for them to migrate. But with habitat loss and destruction, and human encroachment, there is less and less land for viable habitat, resulting in conflict with humans.
Editions Available
20 x 26.6 inch image size on 24 x 30 inch paper, Edition of 15
28 x 37.2 inch image size on 32 x 41.2 inches paper, Limited Edition of 12.
Archival Pigment Prints on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching 350gsm.
With signed and numbered label.
Learn more about Nick Brandt.
