SAHARA
Enter a place where nothing is still, and everything speaks — Lorenzo Vitali’s Sahara captures the ever-changing dance of light, shadow, and sand in a landscape shaped by silence and movement.
July 14, 2023
PICTORIAL STORY
photography LORENZO VITALI
story MELANIE MEGGS
On the remote border between Libya and Niger, where the silence of the desert hums with unseen forces, Italian artist Lorenzo Vitali found a landscape shaped not by human hands, but by wind and time. His latest photographic series, Sahara: The Shape and The Shadow, captures the elusive dialogue between form and light, revealing the desert not as a void, but as a living canvas of constant transformation.
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Each photograph documents a fleeting moment: a dune sculpted by air, a ridge etched by shifting light. But beyond the aesthetic lies a deeper exploration. Lorenzo uses the desert’s transience to question the very nature of perception.
“The shape of the sand is born from the wind, changes with the wind, changes its skin with the wind. The wind makes it abstract and variable. But the visibility of the shape is given by the shadow that rises and falls at various times of the day, creating a changing game of shapes.”
Through this interplay of shadow and structure, Lorenzo constructs a poetic conversation between the visible and the invisible, the permanent and the ephemeral. His work resists narrative and embraces suggestion, inviting viewers to contemplate the intangible — not just of the desert, but of their own emotional landscapes.
With Sahara: The Shape and The Shadow, Lorenzo Vitali continues his career-long pursuit of reimagining the relationship between art and environment. In capturing the desert’s ever-changing contours, he offers not just images, but meditations — on time, nature, and the quiet power of transformation. It’s a body of work that asks us to slow down, look closer, and find shape in shadow.
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