Nick Brandt valuation
Photographed East Africa's animals as portraits, then turned to the people and places losing them.
Nick Brandt was born in London, studied painting and then film at Saint Martin's School of Art, and directed music videos before photography took over; filming Michael Jackson's Earth Song in Tanzania in 1995 is what first took him to East Africa.
What a work by Nick Brandt is worth
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Bio
Nick Brandt was born in London, studied painting and then film at Saint Martin's School of Art, and directed music videos before photography took over; filming Michael Jackson's Earth Song in Tanzania in 1995 is what first took him to East Africa. The trilogy that followed — On This Earth, A Shadow Falls and Across the Ravaged Land — photographs elephants, lions and chimpanzees in black and white on a medium-format film camera without a telephoto lens, close enough that the animals appear to sit for portraits rather than being watched from a distance. In 2010 he co-founded Big Life Foundation to fund anti-poaching work around Amboseli. Later series, among them Inherit the Dust and The Day May Break, turned to the people and landscapes affected by the loss. He is no relation of Bill Brandt.
The work is sold as editioned prints, and most images were editioned separately at several sizes, from modest to very large, so the size and the edition number identify the work rather than the picture. The prints are archival pigment prints on paper, and a signed label or certificate from the studio normally travels with each one. Because many are very large works on paper, condition deserves close attention: handling creases, light exposure and damage from framing are all harder to put right at that scale than on a small sheet. The early animal photographs and the later series are distinct bodies of work, best identified by title and year. The studio is the reference for edition details.
The trilogy, Big Life and Inherit the Dust
On This Earth, published in 2005 with introductions by Jane Goodall and others, was followed by A Shadow Falls in 2009 and Across the Ravaged Land in 2013, the three titles forming one sentence. Across the Ravaged Land brought people into the pictures for the first time, among them a ranger from the Big Life Foundation, which Brandt set up in 2010 to protect ecosystems in Kenya and Tanzania.
Inherit the Dust, published in 2016, set life-size prints of his earlier animal portraits into landscapes of quarries, wasteland and building sites. Each series has its own edition structure, and the series, title, size and edition number together identify a print.
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