When Desert is turned into Art.

“You always remember your first. It was 1993 that I visited for the first time a desert. It was in the Mojave desert in California, I was scared and attracted at the same time by this arid environment with no signs of life.

Curiously, just one year later the UN decided to establish a convention called UNCCD; United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. It was 1994. The following years I spent time in the African deserts, living and photographing the environment, meeting the people that lived there. DesArtification was born in 2015 and consists of 22 suggestive and very intimate portraits of the sand deserts from my private archive of works done over a 10 years period. It is the essence of what I saw and of what my soul has memorised.

My aesthetics researches and studies of the desert led me to realise several trekkings and expeditions in the Sahara, the largest hot desert and the third largest desert in the world after Antarctica and the Arctic. Sand, light and shadows help us to reflect on the need to protect the territory, earth, nature and life before all these elements are permanently covered in sand, transformed into ghosts made of dust.”

– Discover more of Nik’s work here