Nick Brandt (born 1964) is an English photographer and music video director. His photographs focus on the impact of environmental destruction and climate breakdown, for both some of the most vulnerable people across the planet and for the animal and natural world.

Born in 1964 and raised in London, England, Brandt studied painting, and then Film at Saint Martin's School of Art. He moved to California in 1992 and directed many award-winning music videos for the likes of Michael Jackson ("Earth Song", "Stranger in Moscow"), Whitney Houston ("I Will Always Love You"), Moby ("Porcelain"), Jewel ("Hands"), Grayson Hugh ("Talk It Over"), + XTC ("Dear God") among others.

It was in 1995 while directing "Earth Song" in Tanzania that Brandt fell in love with the animals and land of East Africa. In 2001, frustrated that he could not capture on film his feelings about the destruction of the natural world, he realized there was a way to achieve this through photography.

In 2001, Brandt embarked upon his first photographic project: a trilogy of work to memorialize the vanishing natural grandeur of East Africa.

This work bore little relation to the typical, color, documentary-style wildlife photography. Brandt's images were mainly graphic portraits more akin to studio portraiture of human subjects from a much earlier era, as if these animals were already long dead. "The resulting photographs feel like artifacts from a bygone era". Using a Pentax 67II with two fixed lenses, Brandt photographed on medium-format black and white film without telephoto or zoom lenses. He writes: "You wouldn't take a portrait of a human being from a hundred feet away and expect to capture their spirit; you'd move in close."

A book of the resulting photography, On This Earth, was released in 2005 and constituted 66 photos taken from 2000 to 2004 with introductions by the conservationist and primatologist Jane Goodall, author Alice Sebold, and photography critic Vicki Goldberg.

In the afterword, Brandt explained the reasons for the methods he used at the time: "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."

Returning to Africa repeatedly from 2005 to 2008, Brandt continued the project. The second book in the trilogy, A Shadow Falls, was released in 2009 and featured 58 photographs taken during the preceding years.