“Nick Brandt’s epic panoramas serve as a heartbreaking epitaph to a paradise lost.”
— Sunday Times UK
 

Custot Gallery Dubai is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Inherit the Dust, the latest series of photographs by Nick Brandt showing from 8 December 2016 until 28 February 2017.
 

Three years after the conclusion of his trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls and Across the Ravaged Land, Nick Brandt revisits East Africa to photograph and alert us to the fragile ecosystem and increasing urbanization of the continent’s natural parks and sweeping landscapes. Best known for his intimate depictions of wild animals and their disappearing habitats, the artist captures the human impact in territories where animals used to roam.

The exhibition features a series of large-scale black and white panoramas that depict the perishing natural world in contrast with an explosive urban development. For this recent body of work, Nick Brandt has printed and enlarged his animal portraits to life-size, placing them in locations such as factories, underpasses and quarries. The resulting artworks feature haunting representations of the most majestic and endangered species – elephants, rhinoceroses, zebras, lions, apes – as they seem to wander through a wasteland of despair and destruction.
 

The juxtaposition between the natural and urban world is further emphasised through the artist’s use of monochrome, illustrating a poignant view of East Africa’s contemporary state and the vast growth that has affected its human and animal populations alike. Humans are equally ground down by this rapid development, Nick Brandt captures them going about their everyday life, surviving, oblivious to the landscape’s environmental degradation and the animal’s ghost-like images.

Each arresting and carefully framed photograph is a wake up call. Brandt boldly stresses the ecological and social dilemmas that extend beyond the people and wildlife of East Africa, sending a strong message “home” emphasising that these are not just local but global environmental concerns.