This post is also available in: French

This exhibition at Waddington Custot is presenting new photographs by contemporary British artist Nick Brandt from his latest series This Empty World (2016–18). His work is a powerful visual polemic which explores themes of environmental destruction wrought by human activity. In This Empty World, Brandt uses colour for the first time, bringing a new immediacy to these environmental issues as experienced by both animals and humans.

Confrontational and direct, Brandt’s photographs conceal a painstaking process. This Empty World was constructed on Maasai land in Kenya. Each image combines two moments in time captured weeks apart, almost always from the same camera position. First, a partial set is built and lit, and a camera is fixed in place with motion sensors. After the animals have entered the frame and been captured on camera, the sets are completed and populated with a human cast drawn from local communities and beyond. Brandt interweaves the two images in post-production, bringing out the chiaroscuro and detail. At the end of the project, the elements of each set are recycled and the land returned to its original state.

Brandt photographs animals such as elephants, hyenas and lions in their natural habitat in East Africa. These endangered species are increasingly under threat from loss of habitat and sprawling urban infrastructure, represented by the concrete highways, petrol stations and bridges under construction that feature in Brandt’s
scenes. Photographed mostly at night, the lurid glow of artificial light creates an eerie and unnatural atmosphere.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the launch of the monograph Nick Brandt: This Empty World, which will include reproductions of the entire series and new essays by the artist.