“The notion of portraits of dead animals in the place where they once lived, placed in positions as if alive again in death, was just too compelling to ignore,” Brandt said of his decision to photograph the animals. “There was never any possibility of bending a wing or turning a head to make a better pose - they were like rock,” he said, “so we took them and placed them on branches and rocks just as we found them, always with a view to imagining it as a portrait in death.”Ī fish eagle © Nick Brandt 2013, Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery, NY The creatures, he said, were “rock hard” from the calcification. The entire fish eagle was the most surprising and revelatory find,” Brandt, who photographed these calcified animals in 20, told The Huffington Post in an email Wednesday. “Discovering these animals washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron, I thought they were extraordinary - every last tiny detail perfectly preserved down to the tip of a bat’s tongue, the minute hairs on his face. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry.” “The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. One theory that has been suggested by Brandt is that “the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, causing them to crash into the lake,” Brandt writes in his new photo book Across the Ravaged Land. It is not entirely clear how the birds die. “The idea for me, instantly, was to take portraits of them as if they were alive.”Ī bat © Nick Brandt 2013, Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery, NY “When I saw those creatures for the first time alongside the lake, I was completely blown away,” says Brandt. The haunting lake was first photographed by photographer Nick Brandt who stumbled on the lake in 2011 on his way to shoot photos for a new book on the disappearing wildlife of East Africa.
The alkali salt crust on the surface of the lake is also every so often colored deep red or pink by the salt-loving microorganisms that live there. It is around 60 km long and is fed mainly by the Ewaso Ng’iro River. Lake Natron is a salt lake located in northern Tanzania, close to the Kenyan border, in the eastern branch of Africa’s Great Rift Valley.
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