Calcified: Photographer Nick Brandt's stunning representation of life in death

A LAKE so poisonous that almost nothing can live there has become a canvas for an artist who has captured the essence of life in death.

Just one of Nick Brandt's stunning images. Click on the gallery link in the story below to see much more.

A LAKE so poisonous that almost nothing can live there has become a canvas for an artist who has captured the essence of life in death.

Nick Brandt, a British photographer who lives in the US, was in Tanzania, east Africa, when he discovered the curious nature of Lake Natron, a toxic soda lake where the water temperature can reach 60C.

Brandt, who has spent much time in Africa in his photographic work and as a conservationist, noticed a bleak but fascinating phenomenon in the form of dead animals on the lake shore. The birds and bats had died in the water, but their remains had been so immediately affected by its chemicals that they had calcified and preserved as animal mummies.

The science of natural preservation inspired the artist to pose some of the dead creatures as if they were still alive, the idea leading to a series of haunting, yet stunning, images.

Gallery: Click here to see all the amazing images

"I could not help but photograph them," Brandt said. "No one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake's surface confuses them and, like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake.

"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. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry.

"I took these creatures as I found them on the shoreline, and then placed them in `living' positions, bringing them back to `life', as it were. Reanimated, alive again in death."

The lake takes its name from natron, a naturally occurring compound made mainly of sodium carbonate. The concentrated chemical mix is caused by volcanic ash from the Great Rift Valley.

But Brandt remains more interested in conserving living animals than the preservation of the dead.

He and conservationist Richard Bonham founded the Big Life conservation foundation in 2010 and it now employs more than 300 rangers protecting wildlife from poachers in east Africa.

Asked what motivates him, he said that "quite simply, the thought that something so extraordinary as the animal life and natural world of this planet is being systematically annihilated by man. And a, I want to document it before it is all gone through my photography, and b, try and save some of it before it is all gone though my conservation work."

Brandt only shoots in Africa because "this is the place that moves me the most".

"Pretty much the last place on the planet where one sees vast numbers of animals of different species living together en masse," he said.

His art reflects his passion and an exhibition of his work, Across the Ravaged Land, will show at Source Photographia in Melbourne from this weekend until October 29.