The third and last book of Nick Brandt’s trilogy documenting the disappearance of the flora and fauna of East Africa; its title completes the title of the whole trilogy, On This Earth, A Shadow Falls Across the Ravaged Land. The book offers a dark vision of the world he photographed over ten years, still rich in incredible beauty but now tragically contaminated and rapidly destroyed by the hand of man. New themes appear in a series of intense and powerful portraits of animals that seem to pose for the photographer as if in a studio. For the first time human beings appear in his pictures, as in the one where a group of crouching rangers holds the weight of the tusks of elephants killed by poachers. In one series hunting trophies are placed in the epic landscape where these creatures once lived; another shows animals petrified by the salt water of a Rift Valley lake. In both series the animals appear strangely alive and sentient, as if posing for a portrait. Two essays by the photographer accompany the pictures, describing the two impulses behind the project: the commitment to protecting our planet and photography as a means of expressing moral values. In 2010 he founded the Big Life Foundation to help preserve the ecosystem of Kenya and Tanzania.