Desert Trails

Contributors, Densities, Formats, Low Density, Survey, Territory and mobility, Topics, Xavier Ribas.

Desert, Extreme environments, Landscape, Photography, Survey.

Desert Trails (2012) is a series of photographs of the Atacama Desert taken mostly from the vantage points of slag heaps from abandoned nitrate works. The photographs show the disrupted surfaces of the desert around abandoned industrial sites, towns and ore fields. Technically and aesthetically, these images emulate late 19th- and early 20th-century landscape photographs of nitrate works, produced as records of investment by the nitrate producers themselves, or for propaganda purposes. Those historical photographs and photographic albums are now held in national libraries, archives and museums. They have become the official visual record of the nitrate industry.