Beyond Wildlife: Nick Brandt’s Haunting Portraits of Syrian refugees

Nick Brandt (born 1964) is a British photographer whose work focuses on the impact of environmental destruction and climate breakdown, for both some of the most vulnerable people and for the animal and natural world.

Since 2020, he has been working on The Day May Break, an ongoing global series that portrays people and animals impacted by climate change and environmental destruction. Chapter One (2021) was photographed in Kenya and Zimbabwe, Chapter Two (2022) in Bolivia. SINK / RISE, Chapter Three (2023) was photographed in Fiji, and The Echo of Our Voices, Chapter Four (2024) photographed in Jordan.

THE ECHO OF OUR VOICES

This is an ongoing series, The Day May Break. Captured in Jordan, a nation recognized as the second most water-scarce country globally, these powerful photographs highlight the profound and ongoing struggles faced by refugee families from Syria.

Having fled the devastating conflict in their homeland, these families now confront new and relentless challenges—finding stable work and housing. Their lives are defined by continuous displacement, driven by economic hardship and the scarcity of opportunities. Forced into constant movement, they must relocate multiple times annually, searching for temporary agricultural jobs and makeshift homes wherever they can find shelter.

www.nickbrandt.com

Nick Brandt, Botswana 1999 by Topangahomeboy is licensed under CC BY 4.0

HM: Before we delve into your latest project, Chapter Four of The Day May Break: The Echo of Our Voices, let’s step back and discuss your approach to photography. How did you arrive at the photographer you are today?

NB: I was originally a filmmaker. I wanted to tell fiction-based stories about the environmental destruction of the natural world, but I could never get the financing. Finally, I realised that I could express my feelings about these themes through photography, and switched careers. It was the best decision I ever made. I could create what I want, how I want, when I want.

HM: Why did you choose to currently focus on climate change?

NB: Because it’s the single most consequential issue ever faced by humanity. And it’s all interconnected—socio-political, environmental, it all merges together.

HM: Your viewpoint is like that of a photojournalist, but you also produce your work like a filmmaker. Can you talk about this unique methodology?

NB: The initial concept always relates to something especially troubling me at the time. Having said that, these days, pretty much everything troubles me. But I only embark on a new project when the concept is visually one that I feel hasn’t been done before. However, if they haven’t been done before, I think it may be because generally, they are so elaborate. But at the beginning I tend to be wildly optimistic, naively thinking that they won’t end up being that expensive.

With The Echo of Our Voices, I thought, oh, it’s just photographing people on some boxes in the desert. And when you look at the photos, it probably doesn’t look like it was actually that hard to execute.

The people in the photos are refugee families living in Jordan who fled the war in Syria over a decade ago, and are now living lives of continuous displacement as a result of climate change. They are forced to move several times a year to wherever there is work in the fields that have had enough rain for crops to grow.

Now, I could have saved a huge amount of complication and money if we had just thrown some boxes in the back of a truck and driven around Jordan, to where the Syrian families were currently living. But then we would never have had this location - Wadi Rum desert in southern Jordan. It’s a location that is a poetic symbol of an increasingly dessicated world, with mountains that become a visual echo of the people and boxes. So for me, there was no choice: we had to bring all the families to the desert and house them and photograph them there.

**HM: Can you share a little about the preparation involved in a project like The Echo of Our Voices?**

NB: The first, most important part of each project is to find the people. So we had a wonderful local casting researcher and coordinator who over two months met and interviewed people around Jordan impacted by climate change.

I arrived in Jordan three weeks before the shoot. This was very necessary time for me, not just to meet the potential families and decide who to invite to the shoot, but to start to get an understanding of how they lived. I had never been to the Middle East before, and I was acutely aware of the need to know the people, their culture, their family connections, before we began photographing them.

Once we were based down in Wadi Rum desert for the six-week shoot, we invited around forty family members each for six-days. We would collect them from their homes, often up to four hours drive away, and put them up in the hotel camp where we were all staying.

I never planned for the families to be all Syrian. But there was something about these Syrian families - that strength and togetherness in the face of such adversity - that drew me to them the most. It makes sense, because these are refugees who lost their homes, their way of life, their communities, their land, everything. Now all they have is each other. There was, is, a grace and humility to them, that also made them perhaps connect more with the principle of the project. And in so doing, perhaps result in more emotional photographs.

HM: In terms of your working relationship with the subjects, how do you navigate that?

NB: The collaboration is critical. The photos are nothing without them and what they also bring to each photograph.

I like the unexpected, serendipity, accidents, that are far more interesting than anything I might pre-script. For me, it is like a kind of photographic jazz. Each person in the photograph is a human version of a musical note, and you work with them, to see if, sometimes out of nowhere, a visual melody forms that somehow indefinably moves you.

After each session, the families would climb down off the boxes and come over to look at a few frames through the viewfinder. I believe that this helped them understand what we were trying to achieve, and I would also like to think, helped them see that they were being photographed with dignity and respect. That this is not merely about their loss but also about their strength and resilience, contributing to a larger narrative about humanity.

**HM: The Echo of Our Voices seems to focus significantly on the connections between people. How did you orchestrate these connections during your shoot?**

NB: In all my previous work, I’ve generally wanted the people in the photographs to pose pretty much how they want. By contrast, this chapter - with its connections between family members on these human islands / sculptures - required frequently complex choreography that I felt was beyond my set of skills. That’s why I worked with two creative collaborators who brought an immeasurable amount to the project.

There are forty-five finished photographs in this series. We probably shot four hundred set-ups, although many were reshoots. That’s a pretty low success rate, in whichever way you may judge something as subjective as “success.” But of course, that failure is a fundamental part of the creative process. To return to those timeless Samuel Becket lines: “Try. Try again. Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” We’re just trying to fail better.

It's a process of shooting and re-shooting, and sometimes you get the magic in the bottle on the first go. For example, The Cave was the first of four attempts, and we never got it back; we started to overthink, and we never got back to the magic. But there are other photographs like Laila and the Women, where that was the fourth attempt.

Women With Sleeping Children - which will be the cover image for the book - that was a first go, and is an example of how unexpected problems can make things better. Just when we had it all worked out, two of the kids got cold and at the last minute, we obviously had to send them back to the the tent to get warm, and as a result, suddenly the frame worked. The choreography on the boxes had a much better flow, the frame was much cleaner. You get these moments of serendipity, which is why I've rarely encountered a problem that didn't result in something better.

I could describe something that happened by accident for the better in every single photograph. This is not revelatory stuff. It’s what everyone who creates goes through. It’s just how much you decide to embrace the problems and accidents.

By the way, I need to say this: none of this translates onto a computer screen or god help us, a phone screen. Any emotional impact these photos might have is purely as a result of the faces and expressions of the families, and you simply cannot see them as viewed in this article without being able to zoom into each face.

HM: As a Western male, you seemed to have very quickly obtained the trust of the families - both men and women, especially the women.

NB: Yes, as you look through the photos, you will notice their dominant presence. In each country that I have photographed, I have consistently noticed how much more comfortable in their own skins girls and women are in front of camera, no matter what the age, whether six years old or 70 years old. As a result, in almost all my photographs, it’s always the women and girls who look straight into the camera with absolute laser-like focus. I’ve tried countless times with men and boys but I have found it rare to find one that has the presence that the women and girls do.

Women with Sleeping Children, Jordan 2024

HM: Speaking of elevation, you make a compelling point about the symbolism of the boxes in your work. Why did you choose to use them?

NB: The stacks of boxes that the families sit and stand together on aim skyward - verticality implying a strength or defiance - and provide pedestals for those that in our society are typically unseen and unheard. Not generals or politicians of history, but human beings equally (or frequently more) worthy of their place in the world.

HM: How do you think photography can impact social issues such as climate change?

NB: I believe in the potential cumulative impact of photographic imagery. A single image may not change the world (well, except for the one of Trump after he was shot), but a multitude of images can hopefully create a greater dialogue and awareness about urgent social issues. I think photojournalism has a particular power, more than fine art photography, which again comes back to my huge interest in photojournalism, even though I’m not a photojournalist.

**HM: That’s interesting you say that. You raised money and shared some of the profits of your fine art print sales with the subjects from The Day May Break Chapter One project, right?**

NB: Yes, but I have only been able to do this on that first chapter - a percentage of proceeds evenly distributed among everyone in the photos. And when I sold prints privately, I could give much more to the people featured in those specific prints. In that way, we have six kids going through six years of education, two couples that were able to start up businesses, a few people were able to rebuild part of their homes, or help a farmer pay for a new irrigation system. And this money, which is so comparatively small to us, is so significant to them.

Now, unfortunately, with each passing year, print sales have dropped so the money they receive has shrunk. The model of making a living from fine art prints seems kind of broken, especially when you’re making projects of this scale. And that is even with the partial funding I received for the latest chapter from Gallerie d’Italia museum in Turin.

I need to be more like Bryan Schutmaat, whose wonderful work is more financially sustainable. He has created a beautiful body of work, driving around the American West with far lower expenses.

I may start a crowdfunding campaign to support the Syrian families to help them get back home now the brutal dictatorial regime of Assad is over. I say “may”, because most of them are waiting to see what happens with the new government, whether it stabilizes. It’s also made a hell of a lot more complicated because all of their homes were destroyed during the war.

HM: Why do you think the sales on prints are decreasing?

NB: A couple of reasons, I think. Most collectors these days are middle-aged or older, and their walls are full. There isn’t much of a younger generation stepping in to replace them—there are some, but nowhere near the numbers we used to see. Personally, I think this change began when Instagram became ubiquitous and people started mainly viewing photographs on their damned phones. But the creativity in all fields has been devalued. When I was growing up, you saved your pocket money to buy the latest album. Now, you can listen to unlimited music for a monthly fee. Obviously, it’s great for consumers, but it hurts creators. For musicians, this means they have to tour to make money because they can no longer rely on sales. Similarly, the perception that owning a limited edition print is special has been diminished by the overwhelming availability of media. There’s significant disposable income around, growing income inequality, but peoples’ interest in what they spend money on increasingly seems to lie elsewhere.

HM: What advice would you give to aspiring photographers?

NB: Always create for yourself. Don't limit yourself to what others may think is acceptable; embrace the fear and the challenges that come with stepping outside your comfort zone. Even if it doesn’t succeed financially, at least you’ve stayed true to your vision. And you may find that, eventually, others will appreciate it.

However, there’s a fear that I think is prevalent right now. A friend’s daughter is studying photography in London, and it seems every student in her year is only photographing himself or herself. They’re afraid to step outside what’s considered acceptable, but you can’t create good work from a place of caution and fear of rejection. You need to be bold. The type of fear that you should embrace is the challenge that pushes you outside your comfort zone.

Majed and Mariam in Moonlight, Jordan 2024

HM: What’s next for you?

NB: I’ve photographed four chapters in four years on four different continents. For 2025, consolidation. I need to figure out how I create next without the same unsustainable financial pressures. And with the madness of the Trump/Musk regime, I need to get out of America - where I have lived more or less my whole adult life - and move to Europe. For now, thankfully, a much more sane, rational place to be.