A Shadow Falls »

Nick Brandt's first book, On This Earth, is one of the most popular photography books of this decade. He lives in Topanga, California. Peter Singer is the author of the influential Animal Liberation. He lives in New York City. Vicki Goldberg is America's leading photography critic and historian. She lives in New Hampshire.

In A Shadow Falls, which features fifty-eight recent images in stunning, oversized tritone plates, Nick Brandt continues his ambitious and ongoing photographic project to memorialize the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa. Brandt’s wide-screen panoramas of animals and landscapes capture an epic vision of Africa that has not been seen before. His iconic portraits of its majestic animals are filled with an empathy usually reserved for human subjects.
 
From the opening images in A Shadow Falls, of a verdant world filled with multitudes of animals, to the closing images of small bands of creatures moving across a parched, dusty earth, Brandt portrays a mythic Africa struggling against tragic forces. In years to come, we will look back at these powerful photographs and wonder why humanity did not do more to preserve this rare corner of earthly paradise.