"Nick Brandt. The Day May Break" exhibition in Turin

Gallerie d'Italia - Turin presents the exhibition Nick Brandt. The Day May Break, curated by Arianna Rinaldo and open to the public from 18 March to 6 September 2026.

The Day May Break, a project launched in 2020, is a series of around 60 works divided into four chapters that portray people and animals affected by climate change and by environmental decline and devastation, highlighting the profoundly disproportionate impact of the climate crisis on the world’s most vulnerable populations. 

Gallerie d’Italia – Turin is the first venue to host all four chapters of The Day May Break, the last of which commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo, together at the same time, offering us a harsh but poetic vision of what remains, for now, and can still offer hope.

Chapter One (2021), set in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and Chapter Two (2022), set in Bolivia, present powerful and moving portraits of people and animals, both severely affected by extreme drought or floods that have destroyed homes and livelihoods, in the same frame. The photographs were taken in various sanctuaries and reserves, where the animals have survived all kinds of calamities, from the destruction of their habitat to the illegal trafficking of wildlife.

Chapter Three - SINK / RISE (2023), set in Fiji, offers a symbolic and pre-apocalyptic vision of rising sea levels. The subjects, filmed directly underwater, represent the many communities that will lose their homes, land and identity in the decades to come due to the rise in sea levels caused by climate change.

Chapter Four - The Echo of Our Voices (2024), set in the Jordanian desert, portrays families of refugees who left Syria to escape the war and who still live in a state of constant displacement, in a world that is parched largely as a result of climate change. In this chapter, Brandt offers a profound and sensitive reflection on human connections and resilience in the face of adversity.

Nick Brandt was born in London, England, in 1964. For over twenty years, Nick Brandt's photographic series have focused on the effects of environmental destruction and climate collapse not only on the most vulnerable populations but also on animals and nature.

His photographic research began in East Africa with the trilogy entitled On This Earth, A Shadow Falls, Across The Ravaged Land (2001–2012), in which he revealed animals as sentient creatures, not so different from ourselves, capturing them in intimate and elegiac portraits in their natural habitat, similar in style to human portraiture in a studio setting.

Next came the panoramic, dystopian and cinematic series Inherit the Dust (2016) and This Empty World (2019), also set in East Africa.