I have never seen such a wonderful elephant.

I can’t stop looking at the photograph on the cover of A Shadow Falls (2009), the second in Nick Brandt’s trilogy featuring his majestic photographs taken in Amboseli National Park, Maasai Mara, and other preserves in East Africa. Elephant, lion, zebra, cheetah, and giraffe are captured in poses so timeless and perfect that it is hard to believe they were taken in the wild. The sepia tone makes them look like old photographs of long-dead relatives. These portraits alternate in the book with awesome two-page panoramas showing animals, alone or en masse, against the empty landscape. As you page through the book, the landscape becomes drier and dustier, and the images of the animals themselves are paler, as if they were fading away before our eyes.

In the first book of the trilogy, On This Earth, many of the animals are seen in sunlit, verdant landscapes of grasses and trees. A playful young elephant is captured in the cover shot.

While the photographs in A Shadow Falls are equally stunning, enough so to make you gasp, here the landscape often appears bleak and unable to sustain life. The final book, Across the Ravaged Land, documents the destruction of Africa’s great mammals by man.

My wonderful elephant can no longer be seen in the wild — he is dead, killed by poachers in 2009. Poachers aren’t the only threats: tremendous herds of cattle are being illegally moved into the parks, where they drink what little water there is, forcing the wild animals to leave the protection of the preserve in search of sustenance. As Peter Singer says in an introduction to the book, the shadow that falls on these animals is ours. As much as Nick Brandt’s photographs may fill us with awe, they should also fill us with sorrow — and shame.