FRAMES Photography Podcast with Nick Brandt

In today’s episode, W. Scott Olsen speaks with Nick Brandt, a London-born photographer whose globally exhibited work confronts the human and environmental crises of our time.

You can listen to this interview using our podcast player below, but we strongly encourage you to subscribe to the podcast in your podcast app so that you don’t miss any future show episodes.

Nick Brandt is a London-born photographer whose work examines the deepening intersection of human upheaval, climate change, and environmental collapse. Over the past two decades, his series have been exhibited in major museums and galleries around the world and published in a succession of influential photobooks that trace a consistent, urgent vision.

His newest book, The Echo of Our Voices: The Day May Break, Chapter Four, created in 2024 in the deserts of southern Jordan, focuses on Syrian refugee families living in one of the world’s most water-scarce regions. These families, continually displaced by drought and the search for seasonal agricultural work, stand atop stacked boxes that lift them toward the sky—a gesture of visibility, resolve, and dignity for people often overlooked.

Brandt’s long-term commitment to the subjects he photographs extends beyond the frame. In 2010, he co-founded Big Life Foundation, a nonprofit operating across Kenya and Tanzania that now employs more than 350 local rangers protecting 1.6 million acres of the Amboseli–Kilimanjaro ecosystem. Having spent most of his adult life in the mountains of southern California, Brandt is in the process of relocating to Portugal, where he continues to expand a body of work that merges art, advocacy, and an unwavering belief in the value of every human life.