The Story

The Oldest Desert on Earth

The Namib is one of the oldest deserts in the world, and in its heart, roughly 350 kilometers southwest of Windhoek within Namib-Naukluft National Park, sit Sossusvlei and Deadvlei — among the most photographed landscapes anywhere. Sossusvlei's apricot-colored dunes rise as high as 380 meters, including Big Daddy, one of the tallest dunes on the planet at nearly 1,000 feet. Nearby, Deadvlei holds a stand of camelthorn trees that have stood dead in a cracked white clay pan for close to a thousand years, black against the white ground and the red dunes behind them. Farther west, the Skeleton Coast takes its name from the whale bones and shipwrecks scattered along a shoreline shaped by dense fog and treacherous currents, while inland, Etosha National Park's vast salt pan draws elephants, lions, rhinos, and giraffes to its waterholes through the dry season.

This shoot moves through that range of terrain — dune light at sunrise, the stark geometry of Deadvlei, and the wildlife and coastline beyond it — documenting a country built almost entirely out of extremes.

Selected work

Namibia