Animals returned to the formerly wild
Photoswithinphotos offer a more realistic portrait of Africa today
At first glance, the picture of a herd of wild elephants lumbering through a freeway underpass looks out of place. To create it, photographer Nick Brandt took the image in Kenya, blew it up to lifesize and glued it to a panel. Then he placed the panel under the nearest freeway and waited perhaps 10 days until the people who live under the overpass became accustomed to the image. That’s when he came back to take another picture of the homeless and the herd.
He wanted “the people in the photographs to become oblivious to the panels so that the animals look like ghosts in the landscape,” he explains.
And that’s how “Underpass With Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life Is on Track)” was made. It was Brandt’s way to suggest that elephants and people are trying to survive in an environment that is natural to neither species. Now the photo is one of 13 prints that form “Nick Brandt: Inherit the Dust,” his solo exhibition of environmental photography making its West Coast premiere at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art.
“You have both humans and animals appearing lost,” says the 55yearold English artist, who lives in the Santa Monica Mountains. “It’s almost as if the mother elephant is looking down at the homeless humans. Both are the victims of environmental degradation.”
The photograph within the photograph idea did not come together at once. Brandt made portraits of the animals during regular trips to Kenya between 2003 and 2011, but he never published them. Four years later, he figured out a fresh take on it.
“Animals such as these used to roam these urban locations,” he says. “The panels were placed in the landscapes to
show that with invasive human developments there is no longer space for both humans and animals.”
What gave the project its artistic tension was knowing that most of the Kenyans featured in the images have probably never seen the majestic animals in their native habitat. Only the elderly would have seen them in the wild. The native habitat could be as close as 5 kilometers from the urban core, but that is still too far for people just trying to get by.
The contrivance of the project doesn’t bother Brandt. He is not a wildlife photographer. He sees this project as closer to street photography, with him providing a temporary streetscape.
The pictures were shot in blackandwhite, medium format, with the images stitched together to create panoramas 5 feet high and 12 feet long. The show fills the entire museum, 3,000 square feet. Installed, “it is sweeping yet intimate,” says museum Executive Director Linda Keaton. “Stunningly beautiful yet profoundly disturbing.”
The body of work does not necessarily show the Kenya that people want to see, but that is Brandt’s point.
“It’s a more realistic vision of contemporary Africa when it comes to the natural world,” he says. “Too many people think of Africa as this wilderness, and it’s just not like that anymore.”