Nick Brandt è un fotografo britannico, noto per fotografare esclusivamente in Africa. Uno dei suoi obiettivi è quello di registrare un testamento di animali e luoghi selvatici e luoghi prima che questi vengan distrutti dalle mani dell’uomo. Nick Brandt was born in London in 1966. He studied at the Saint Martin’s School of Art before moving to the United States in 1992. His first job in the US was to direct music videos for many famous artists such as Michael Jackson, Moby or Jewel. These video clips were at the top of the charts and won multiple awards. In 1995, Brandt arrived in Tanzania to direct a video clip for Michael Jackson’s Earth Song. Setting foot on African soil became a decisive moment for the artist and his career. Discovering Africa made Nick Brandt give up directing music videos and encouraged him to dedicate himself fully to photography. In 2000, Nick Brandt came to Eastern Africa to start an ambitious project: capture the endangered splendor of African wildlife. Why the animals of Africa in particular? And more particularly still, East Africa? There is perhaps something more profoundly iconic, mythical, mythological even, about the animals of East Africa, as opposed to say, the Arctic or South America. There is also something deeply, emotionally stirring and affecting about the plains of Africa – the vast green rolling plains punctuated by the graphically perfect acacia trees. […] My images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted Africa. They’re my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing. […] And being that close to the animals, I get a real sense of intimate connection to them, to the specific animal in front of me. Sometimes a deliberate feeling that they’re almost presenting themselves for a studio portrait. In Eastern Africa, Nick Brandt dives into wonderful landscapes and begins shooting a series of pictures that will soon make him famous all over the world. Only a few photographers can claim to have captured the core nature of animals. Nick Brandt’s photos do not have much in common with the documentary pictures one could find in National Geographic: his photos are true works of art. I’ve always thought this something of a wasted opportunity. The wild animals of Africa lend themselves to photographs that extend aesthetically beyond the norm of 35mm-color telephoto wildlife photography. And so it is, that in my own way, I would like to yank the subject matter of wildlife into the arena of fine art photography. To take photographs that transcend what has been a largely documentative genre I get extremely close to these very wild animals, often within a few feet of them. I don’t use telephoto lenses. This is because I want to see as much of the sky and landscape as possible – to see the animals within the context of their environment […]. The first piece of Brandt’s triptych, On This Earth, was published in October 2005 by Chronicle Books. Since 2004, Nick Brandt’s work has been featured in exhibitions of famous galleries in London, Berlin, Hamburg, New York, Los Angeles, Santa Fe, Sydney, Melbourne and San Francisco. Style Few photographers have ever considered the photography of wild animals, as distinctly opposed to the genre of Wildlife Photography, as an art form. The emphasis has generally been on capturing the drama of wild animals IN ACTION, on capturing that dramatic single moment, as opposed to simply animals in the state of being., says the artist. Nick Brandt‘s work captures the beauty of African nature before its destruction by Man. He spends countless hours in the dark room, then scans the pictures and edits them digitally. The first Brandt solo exhibition was presented at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm, from October 2011 to January 2012, and attracted almost 140 000 visitors.