Nick Brandt

Rakan Sisters

Chapter four.

Chapter five.

Chapter fifty.

Given the environmental path of our planet, who knows how many chapters of this se-ries there could be? Sadly, it increasingly seems like there could be a limitless number. If money and lifespan were no issue, I would keep creating more chapters in different parts of the world. After all, as I write this in 2025, we are still in the early hours of the Anthropocene.

In spite of that, each time I finish one chapter, I don’t know what will come next. I don’t know where I will go, nor what the concept will be.

In September 2023, I finished and released SINK / RISE, chapter three of The Day May Break. Photographed entirely underwater in Fiji, the concept related to sea level rise as a result of climate change.

A few weeks later, Meeri, a photographer friend, texted me that she was on her way to the desert of southern Jordan. She described deserts as places of “contrasts, softness, and roughness,” of “illusions within reality.” In that moment, I realized that it made sense to go from the South Pacific, a part of the planet where, with climate breakdown, there will be too much water, to another place, the Middle East, with an increasing near absence of it.

In chapter one, photographed in Kenya and Zimbabwe, I had photographed many people whose lives had been impacted by years-long severe droughts, to the point that some were climate refugees, but I hadn’t made this the focus of a chapter yet. Nor had I photographed in one of the most arid places on the planet.

Jordan is considered to be the second most water-scarce country in the world. Whether it’s the second or fourth most water-scarce, it’s not good. But an astonishing statistic: according to the United Nations, Jordan’s supply of fresh water per person has plum-meted 97 percent since the start of the twenty-first century.

I researched other countries around the world with deserts, but I kept coming back to Wadi Rum desert in the south of Jordan. It was the verticality of the mountains emerg-ing out of the desert plains and dunes that captured my imagination. It was the place that bore the most similarity to the visual inspiration of Gustave Doré’s extraordinary Bible engravings.

In the previous chapters, I had shown my subjects mainly in isolation, separated from almost everything that they knew, and usually separated from each other. There is a certain desolation in those images. A disconnection. However, from the beginning, I wanted this chapter to be very different in tone, both visually and emotionally: a show of connection and resilience—that in the face of adversity, when all else is lost, you still have each other.

The reason for this difference? As things seem to grow darker with each passing year, I myself felt the need for a change of energy within the series.

Mariam and Families

The concept developed into this: human islands/sculptures of family members whose lives are dramatically impacted by climate change, gathered together in the vast arid expanse. The stacks of boxes upon which the families sit and stand aim skyward—a ver-ticality implying a strength or defiance—and provide pedestals for those that in our so-ciety are typically unseen and unheard. Not generals or politicians of history, but human beings equally (or frequently more) worthy of their place in the world.

In the weeks before we arrived in Jordan, Lubna, our committed casting researcher/co-ordinator and translator, traveled around much of Jordan, meeting families whose lives had been severely impacted by climate change.

She met Jordanian famllies. And she met a lot of Syrian families. When I arrived in Jor-dan, I spent the first two weeks traveling around meeting many of the families that Lubna had met and interviewed.

There was something about the Syrian families that drew me to them the most. Having fled the war in Syria in the years 2013–15, they were now living lives of continuous dis-placement due to climate change, forced to move up to several times a year, moving their tents to where there is available agricultural work, to wherever there has been suf-ficient rainfall to enable crops to grow.

It’s a cycle with no end in sight while they live in Jordan. They themselves all see how dramatic the changes have been over the last decade, their lives so compromised by the dramatically diminished winter rains.

As they said, water is life. And life is getting harder.

When I first came up with the concept for this fourth chapter, I had no idea that the se-ries would almost entirely feature Syrian refugee families, but with this extra dimension of perpetual displacement, featuring them made so much sense.

These are people who lost their homes, their way of life, their communities, their land, everything. Now all they have is each other. It seems to have given them a strength and togetherness in the face of such adversity. There was, is, a grace and humility to them, that perhaps also made them connect more with the principle of the project.

In each country that I have photographed, I have consistently noticed how much more comfortable in their own skins girls and women are in front of the camera. But I have never seen that more clearly than with these Syrian families. Perhaps, as you look through the photos, you will notice their dominant presence. Only when I think some-one has the strength and presence to look directly to camera do I ask them to do so. And as you look through the photographs, you will see that, in all but one instance, it is the women, the matriarchs at the center of the gathered families, and the young girls who hold our gaze with a laser-like focus.

Fasel and Inas

December 8, 2024.

This was the historic day when the brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was over-thrown. On that day, it became possible for the people in these photographs to finally dream of being able to go home. However, for nearly all of them, their homes and land (and even trees) in Syria were destroyed during the war.

As I write in February 2025, most of them are still waiting to see what will happen with the new government in Syria, whether sufficient stability will be restored to give them enough sense of security to finally return home. And then when they get there, for many there is the enormous challenge of how to find the funds to rebuild. Their dream of a new life is a return to their old life.

And for me, there is another inescapable subtext to the work: the genocide in Gaza. To me, the strength and connection we see in the Syrian families is a reflection of those besieged families in Gaza.

At the end of each phase of shooting, the families were asked by us what it felt like to be photographed in this way. How does that make them feel?

Marooba said that, in her regular life, she feels like she doesn’t exist, but that during the shoot, “I feel like I do exist.”

Shaila says that when she was high up on the boxes, she thought that she has a story that needs to be told.

Kamal said that the experience made them “feel like we are truly human. We feel that we have worth.”

When asked what he would like viewers of the photos to know about them, Kamal replied: “To understand all the challenges that we have faced, that despite all the chal-lenges that we have been through, we are still standing.”

What we heard—as I did at the end of each shoot—is people telling us essentially the same thing: Thank you for hearing us. Thank you for seeing us.

Their reactions mean the most to me. Also, the reactions of the people from those countries and regions. But you, your reactions mean a lot to me as well. By mere virtue of having bought this book, the chances are that you are living a life of comparative comfort. My hope is that you see these people and feel them, feel their struggle and strength, something emblematic of all those beings—human and animal alike—im-pacted in dramatic, traumatic ways through no fault of their own.

Spread across the planet, there is a common link between the countries in which I have photographed this series so far: they all are among the countries that are the least re-sponsible for climate breakdown. Their global carbon emissions have been tiny com-pared to those of industrial nations. Yet, like so many other poorer countries in the world, they are disproportionately harmed by its effects. The grim irony is that many people in these countries are the most vulnerable to the calamitous consequences of the industrialized world’s ways.

There is a quote from the French writer Romain Rolland:

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

Yes. In my head, analyzing the path that humanity is taking, I can only view our future with an exhausted pessimism and anxiety. But my heart beats with a refusal to surren-der. It beats with the belief that it is always worth fighting on. Our desire and will can overcome much while there is still hope and possibility.

Zaina, Laila, and Haroub