THE ECHO OF OUR VOICES • Pre-Order, Shipping September 2025

The Echo of Our Voices is the fourth Chapter of The Day May Break, a global series featuring first humans and animals, and now just humans, impacted by climate change and environmental degradation and destruction.

The photographs feature rural families, who fled the war in Syria, now living in Jordan.

Jordan is considered the second most water-scarce country in the world. Living lives of continuous displacement due to climate change, the families are forced to move their homes up to several times a year, moving to where there is available agricultural work, to wherever there has been sufficient rainfall to enable crops to grow.

The stacks of boxes that the families sit and stand together on aim skyward - a verticality implying a strength or defiance - and provide pedestals for those that in our society are typically unseen and unheard.


“Why do I find myself unable to turn away from these images, or to stop gazing at them? The women stand strong, their bodies dignified, creating a silent language between each other and the rigid cubes that Brandt uses as a stage for the absurd. Girls’ hands disrupt the sense of distress, adding a degree of gentleness to the image, and evoking the tension between the right to express one’s pain and the right to keep silent.

The images suggest meticulous attention to detail, from consideration of tone and movement of light, to shapes of faces and the direction of the wind; in the end, we find ourselves before a piece as intricate and cohesive as lace. Brandt’s work on the subjects’ gestures, their faces and foreheads, the light in their eyes and the selection of groupings—with the backdrop of mountains and desert, between peak and cave, sand and sky—results in photographs that brim with life, inviting questions while offering no answers. They deftly dismantle our ready-made assumptions and give rise to tomes of questions, floating gently in extended silence.

How can refugees keep living, unmoored in space and time? The answer is close at hand, and deeply human: Love. Love, while not enough, is an invisible refuge. In these photographs, the arrangements of refugees’ bodies tell tales of sadness, of lives suspended in temporary time. The images speak of absence, yet also of love. Despite shifting meanings of pain, disquiet, and the unknown, Brandt reveals that love is the thread of their survival.

Each photograph is a painting, and each painting is a small detail in a larger scene of gripping pain the photographs attempt to address. When I stand before them, time itself stands still.

Each photograph contains a rebellious cry. The images tell us, with solemn dignity: Do not avert your eyes.

As I live with the photographs and reach the end, I ultimately realize that they contain a secret. These images are not only photographs, they draw from theatre, film, and poetry; they are the daughter of reality. Deeply truthful, and deeply imaginative. Imaginative for the intensity of pain and that silent cry, truthful as they are rooted in the refugees’ reality.”

-- Edited extracts from the Book Foreword by Samar Yazbek

Author of Where the Wind Calls Home and Planet of Clay