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His animal pictures seem perfectly staged, like sophisticated human portraits. But Nick Brandt doesn’t stage anything when he takes his pictures in East Africa’s savanna – with a medium-format camera and a lot of patience. Two exhibitions present his pictures.

In fact Nick Brandt wasn’t even a photographer. He shot music videos on a grand scale, for example for Michael Jackson. But while shooting the video for Jacko’s „Earth Song” he got hooked on East Africa and its wild life. So he made it his mission to capture this deteriorating world with a photo camera. He made his passion his job a few years later. „There’s something about the animals here – their mythic, mythological, iconic quality”, Brandt said in an interview for the Professional Photographer magazine (pdf).

Brandt works with a Pentax 67 medium-format camera, black and white film, no ultra telephoto like so many other animal photographers. „I photograph animals the same way I would photograph humans“, explains the native Brit. „The only difference is I can’t tell the animal to turn their head to the right and step back six inches.“ To nevertheless get his shots Brandt is up from dusk till down on his trips that last four to six weeks. He patiently waits for his motives and accepts to loose a lot of good shots due to the relatively slow technique.

Brandt’s favorite motives are elephants – because of their personality and their intelligence. Also they are photogenic and vegetarians. But all this – what for? In the interview with Professional Photographer he reveals two things he wants to achieve with his pictures: „To be an elegy to a world that is tragically vanishing, to make people see what beauty is disappearing.“

Galerie Camera Work
Kantstraße 149, 10623 Berlin
Exhibition till January 16th 2010

Young Gallery
75b, ave. Louise, 1050 Brussels
Exhibition November 12th 2009 till February 13th 2010

Links:
Books by Nick Brandt