The Day May Break | Nick Brandt
Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
by David Cass & Stella Skaltsa
The title of Nick Brandt’s immersive, four-part exhibition – currently showing at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Italy – tells us a great deal about the work on show, and about the artist’s worldview. The Day May Break suggests a point at which “reckless capitalism, unchecked exploitation of resources, and careless management of natural habitats” (curator Arianna Rinaldo) may peak to such a degree that we have gone too far, past any point of return. Or, perhaps, a new day may emerge: a fresh start, opportunities to rally, to come together and act. But in order to act we must first react. And powerful art such as this has a unique ability to make us do just that. For we cannot engage unless we feel.
Chapter One – The Day May Break – Kenya and Zimbabwe, 2020–21
Installation view, 2026
Yet, to us at least, visiting the exhibition last week – with hair raised and moved perhaps more than by any exhibition we’ve seen in recent years – a choice between despair and hope doesn’t seem truly to be on offer. In this sense, the content of the exhibition goes against its title. Anyone fortunate enough to encounter this important body of work in person would be hard pressed to feel anything other than hopefulness – particularly in its first two chapters, which we are mostly focussing on in this text. Brandt has placed his subjects here – people and animals pictured in Bolivia, Kenya and Zimbabwe – on equal footing; both impacted by similar consequences of global heating, both left reduced in some form, yet both resilient survivors whose stories have been documented and offered to us. Human and non-human lives are given the same visual weight, unsettling the hierarchy through which we normally encounter ecological catastrophe.
Brought together by a shared pain, the gazes – important in each photograph – of the people and animals pull us in deeply. Often, the people’s postures mimic those of their animal allies, further reinforcing the sense of a crisis that crosses the boundary between human and non-human life, even as its impacts are profoundly uneven. We are not often privy to such images, of people and wild animals occupying the same frame, but also people and animals in those far-off locations so often among the first to experience the effects of a crisis they have done comparatively little to create. The near life-sized scale of these images brings us close to scenes many of us could never imagine encountering.
Chapter One – The Day May Break
Richard and Sky, Zimbabwe
“These are not mere symbols, deployed to drive a point. They are people” Daniel Sherrell writes. Throughout the exhibition, wall texts explain each subject’s story. Here, Richard is described as a maize farmer and cattle owner whose livelihood was dramatically affected by extended droughts; Sky, a four-year-old southern African giraffe had been rescued from a farm where much of the wildlife had been killed by new settlers, leaving only two. The equality between human and animal here is not incidental: Brandt has explained that he deliberately placed Richard high on the ladder so that his head and Sky’s would sit at the same height.
Chapter Two – Sanctuary – Bolivia, 2022
Installation view, 2026
The exhibition doesn’t announce itself as an urgent clarion call. It doesn’t induce panic or demand an immediate response. It moves us in a different way. It is tempting to describe the exhibition as calm, serene even, but that quietness should not be mistaken for a lack of urgency. As Shana Nys Dambrot writes, these are “cautionary tales of tenuous survival” – a description that reveals the work’s tension.
There is something almost deliberately slow about Brandt’s method – from location scouting and medium-format photography to editing and installation – and that slowness finds a corresponding form in the images themselves: spartan, deliberately uncluttered, yet somehow heartbreakingly charged by an awareness of the forces and activities beyond the frame that have led to these scenarios. There is a dignity to each image, a formal strength that matches that of the subjects themselves. There’s no sensationalism; the emotional intensity is clear, but the compositions remain restrained, often softened at the edges by fog, or illuminated by little more than a single hanging bulb. The prints are large enough to immerse ourselves within, yet intimate enough to invite close examination.
Najin and People in Fog, Kenya
Najin is one of the last two northern white rhinos in the world, her species brought to the brink of extinction by decades of poaching.
The people and animals in Brandt’s series were photographed together, in the same space and at the same time – there is no digital compositing. Brandt describes the fog, created on location, as a unifying visual: symbolic of a natural world rapidly fading from view, while also echoing the smoke of wildfires intensified by climate change.
Chapter One – The Day May Break
Installation view, 2026
It’s the expansiveness of these photographs that stays with us. These are not forceful images; they offer us time and space to reflect and digest on our own terms.
The Day May Break is one of those rare exhibitions capable of drawing a vast and varied audience. It is educational without being didactic, relatable without simplifying its subjects, artistically rich without losing sight of what it is asking us to confront. Its distant landscapes and unfamiliar lives somehow feel known; the people and animals depicted become less strangers than fellow inhabitants of a shared planet. The viewer, therefore, becomes witness. There is something especially affecting, too, in encountering work made with such evident care in a moment increasingly mediated by technology and artificial intelligence. That care extends beyond the photographs themselves: the curation guides us through the exhibition, journey-like, allowing each image the space and attention it needs. Every image is considered; nothing is hurried or incidental. The photographs may appear effortless, but the labour behind them is clear – and perhaps that is where much of their power lies.
Chapter Three – SINK / RISE – Fiji, 2023
The third chapter of The Day May Break, SINK / RISE focusses on low-lying South Pacific islanders already being impacted by rising oceans. Photographed underwater off the coast of the Fijian islands, these haunting, surreal scenes represent communities whose homes, land and livelihoods will be lost in the coming decades as global heating drives sea-level rise, compounded by increasingly severe storm surges. Everything is shot in-camera underwater.
Chapter Three – SINK / RISE
Installation view
In an exhibition about a planet under extraordinary pressure, told through four carefully chosen case studies, Brandt has resisted taking shortcuts, choosing instead patience and care, going to extraordinary lengths to raise awareness.
Chapter Four – The Echo of Our Voices – Jordan, 2024
The Cave, Jordan
The fourth chapter follows rural Syrian families who fled war and now live in Jordan, one of the world’s most water-scarce countries. Forced into continuous displacement by climate change, they move their homes several times a year in search of agricultural work and sufficient rainfall for crops to grow.
“Those of us who care must continue to do our damnedest to minimise the damage as best we can. To keep on fighting for all in the here and now, and for those beings that come after us.”
Nick Brandt was born in London in 1964. For over twenty years, Brandt's photographic series have focussed on the effects of environmental destruction and climate collapse not only on the most vulnerable populations but also on animals and nature. The exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia, curated by Arianna Rinaldo, continues until 6th September 2026.
Artworks © Nick Brandt | Photographs by David Cass, taken at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, August 2026 | Published for editorial and educational purposes | Please contact us to suggest an edit: info@alaluz.org | A La Luz is a not-for-profit eco-art project
