Nick Brandt: The Day May Break
Until September 6, 2026, Gallerie d’Italia in Turin presents Nick Brandt: The Day May Break, an exhibition curated by Arianna Rinaldo that brings together, for the first time in a single venue, all four chapters of Brandt’s ambitious photographic project devoted to the consequences of climate change and environmental destruction.
Launched in 2020, The Day May Break is one of Brandt’s most significant bodies of work. Through around sixty photographs made across different continents, the series explores how the climate crisis is reshaping the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable communities, while also affecting animals and the ecosystems they depend on.
The Turin exhibition presents the project as a single narrative, bringing together Chapter One, created in Kenya and Zimbabwe in 2021, Chapter Two, photographed in Bolivia in 2022, SINK / RISE, created in Fiji in 2023, and The Echo of Our Voices, photographed in Jordan in 2024 and commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo.
Seen together, the four chapters trace a journey across Africa, South America, the Pacific and the Middle East, connecting different communities and landscapes through the shared consequences of climate breakdown.
Across the series, Brandt gives the climate crisis faces, bodies and individual stories, transforming an issue often expressed through statistics and projections into something immediate and personal. The work also reflects the evolution of his practice, from his earlier portraits of East African wildlife to increasingly direct investigations of habitat loss, environmental destruction and the impact of human expansion. With The Day May Break, his perspective broadens further, bringing people, animals and landscapes into the same visual and ethical conversation.
The Book
Published by Allemandi on the occasion of the exhibition at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Nick Brandt: The Day May Break is the first volume to bring together the entire project in a single edition. Rather than simply documenting the exhibition, the publication offers a sustained reading of the series and of the visual language Brandt has developed over the course of the project. The sequencing allows the images to unfold as a continuous narrative, moving between different environments and communities while preserving the individuality of the people and animals portrayed. The book also includes The Echo of Our Voices, the most recent chapter, photographed in Jordan in 2024. Its inclusion completes the cycle and makes the volume the most comprehensive publication dedicated to The Day May Break to date.
Seen in book form, Brandt’s photographs acquire a different rhythm from the exhibition space. Connections emerge gradually from one image to the next, while recurring elements such as atmosphere, gesture, landscape and direct human presence reinforce the coherence of a project created across several years and continents.
The Allemandi volume therefore stands as an independent extension of the exhibition, bringing together the different stages of Brandt’s investigation into climate breakdown, vulnerability and survival in a form that allows the work to be revisited as a single, evolving photographic narrative.
About the Author
Nick Brandt was born in London in 1964 and studied painting and film at Saint Martin’s School of Art. He moved to California in 1992.
For more than twenty years, his photographic practice has focused on the relationship between environmental destruction, biodiversity loss and the lives of both human and nonhuman subjects. His work began in East Africa with the trilogy On This Earth, A Shadow Falls and Across the Ravaged Land, created between 2001 and 2012. In these photographs, Brandt portrayed wild animals with an intimacy traditionally associated with human portraiture, presenting them as sentient individuals rather than distant subjects observed in nature. His later projects became increasingly concerned with the transformation of the landscapes those animals inhabited. Inherit the Dust, published in 2016, and This Empty World, published in 2019, explored the impact of rapid development and the disappearance of natural habitats in East Africa.
In 2010, Brandt cofounded the Big Life Foundation, an organisation dedicated to protecting wildlife and ecosystems across large areas of Kenya and Tanzania.
His photographs have been exhibited internationally, including at Fotografiska in Stockholm, the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles. He lives and works in California.
Nick Brandt: The Day May Break
until September 6, 2026
Gallerie d’Italia, Turin – Italy
