“The sun sets and rises. Though we try to tame it with the tick of our clock, it dances to the beat of the valley of the moon.” Jordan’s Wadi Rum desert, translated as ‘Valley of the Moon’ in English, is renowned for its red sands, Mars-like topography, and nomadic Bedouin tribes.

Shot entirely on black and white 35mm and hand-printed by the artist in the darkroom, the project suggests an alternative visual perspective; tracing the viewer’s imagination through a stark depiction of this dream-like world and its ephemera, offering a subjective window into a reality unbound by time or place. A landscape both unchanged for thousands of years, yet seemingly transient, Valley of the Moon presents a visual dialogue with the desert and its transcendental oscillations between man and nature, light and dark, reality and imagination.

“In Bedouin traditions, when a baby is born, the father hunts a scorpion then burns and crushes it, mixes it with olive oil and applies it to the child’s body out of belief that the treatment will protect the infant from scorpions during their life.

These photographs are a scorpion for the desert. The image is captured and swayed in chemicals, then applied to her mind’s eye, out of the belief that the treatment will protect her from the wandering soles of humans throughout her life.

As talismans of her psychic realm, the images rupture forth from the true place of our collective dreams but are just as ephemeral in their shape-shifting layers, holding all that is light and dark in the delicate folds of the burning afternoon sun. Within the red seams of the earth, leaves bloom to the eternal secrets the dust holds buried. Ears blister in her rock, haunted by the shadow cast of a sandalled man. The shadow will be gone, but the sand will stay, until it too shifts, across the desert’s spine.” From the text by Shana Chandra