Born and raised in England, Brandt studied Painting, and then Film in London. He moved to America in 1992 and directed many award-winning music videos for artists like Michael Jackson (Earth Song, Stranger in Moscow, Cry), Jewel and Moby.
It was while directing Earth Song, a music video for Michael Jackson, in Tanzania in 1995, that Nick fell in love with the animals and land of East Africa. Over the next few years, frustrated that he could not capture on film his feelings about animals, he began to realize that there was a way to achieve this through photography.
In 2000, Nick embarked upon his ambitious photographic project : a trilogy of books to memorialize the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa. The first two parts of the trilogy have been published in On This Earth (2005), A Shadow Falls (2009), and On This Earth, A Shadow Falls (2010, combining the best photos from the first two books).
Since 2004, Nick has had mutiple solo exhibitions worldwide, including in New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Sydney, Munich, Brussels, and Paris.
Nick photographs on medium format black and white film without telephoto or zoom lenses. His work is a combination of wide-screen panoramas of animals within vast landscapes, and graphic portraits more akin to studio portraiture of human subjects from the early 20th Century, as if these animals were from a bygone era.
In one of his books, Nick explains :
"I'm not interested in creating work that is simply documentary
or filled with action and drama, which has been the norm in the
photography of animals in the wild. What I am interested in is
showing the animals simply in the state of Being. In the state of
Being before they are no longer are. Before, in the wild at least,
they cease to exist. This world is under terrible threat, all of it
caused by us. To me, every creature, human or nonhuman, has an
equal right to live, and this feeling, this belief that every
animal and I are equal, affects me every time I frame an animal in
my camera. The photos are my elegy to these beautiful creatures, to
this wrenchingly beautiful world that is steadily, tragically
vanishing before our eyes."