REGIONAL—Jim Brandenburg, one of the world’s most celebrated nature photographers, has died at the age of 79. That shocking news was shared by members of his family, who were with him when he passed away peacefully at his home in Medina on April 4.
Brandenburg had been undergoing treatment for anaplastic thyroid carcinoma for the past seven months and recently developed pneumonia, a further complication.
His passing came less than two months following the death of his son Anthony.
While Brandenburg lived in the Twin Cities suburbs, he was widely associated with his adopted home of Ely, where he resided at times and maintained a Sheridan Street business, The Brandenburg Gallery.
Soft-spoken and intensely private, Brandenburg found seclusion and peace at his remote residence near Moose Lake, about 20 miles east of Ely. Dubbed Ravenwood, the tasteful home, designed by David Salmela, is nestled in the woods overlooking a small waterfall along Judd Creek.
Brandenburg, who was born and raised in Luverne, began his career as a photojournalist at the Worthington Daily Globe, but it was his nature photography during his many years with National Geographic that began to draw international acclaim.
In his early years, he trained his lens on the beauty of Minnesota’s southwestern prairie, but later ventured further north, where his work focused, for many years, on the wildlife and landscape of the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Becky Rom, of Ely, who was a friend of Brandenburg’s since the 1980s, recalls visiting him one day at Ravenwood to update him on some of her efforts to protect the BWCAW. She recalls at one point he jumped up from his chair and printed off several of his images from the wilderness and gave them to Rom. “To this day, I take his images whenever I go to Washington,” said Rom. “They have been very effective in telling a story that words cannot tell.”
That was true throughout Brandenburg’s prolific career and many of the stories he told through his images came from some of the world’s most austere landscapes, ranging from the Namibian Desert of Africa to the high Canadian arctic, which is where he captured some of his most iconic imagery. His image of a white Arctic wolf leaping between ice floes proved to be one of his most famous and enduring. It was later named one of the 100 most important photographs in Canadian history.
Bradenburg’s list of accolades for his work is global in nature and far too long to list more than a few highlights. In 1991, for his work with the Wolf Ridge Environmental Center, his creation of the nonprofit Concerts for the Environment, and his work with the Nature Conservancy, he received the United Nation’s 500 Environmental World Achievement Award, which was presented to him by the King of Sweden.
His work appeared in a collection of the 40 most important nature photographs of all time, a work that included the work of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Eliot Porter. The collection, selected by members of the International League of Conservation Photographers, included four of Brandenburg’s images, the most of any other photographer. Two of them were taken in Minnesota, including an image of bison on a frozen landscape at Blue Mounds State Park, and his famous “Brother Wolf” image, taken near Ely.
In 2023, Brandenburg received the Lifetime Achievement Award from National Geographic magazine, an honor he received years earlier from the North American Nature Photography Association.
Brandenburg is survived by his wife Judy, daughter Heidi, and her husband Nels Pierson. An obituary was not available as of the Timberjay’s weekly press time.