

lamp as he took portraits of mechanics and artisans in fire-retardant jumpsuits. Last fall, he designated me as a “second photo assistant,” so that I could accompany him to a shoot on the floor of the Ferrari factory, in Maranello, Italy. We’ve had dinners in Rome and Lisbon, and I’ve played tag with his eight- and twelve-year-old daughters in a park in Lausanne. Since then, we have worked together several times, once sharing a cabin on an expedition vessel for ten days at sea. We met on assignment for this magazine, in Chad, almost five years ago, when I was twenty-six and he was fifty-three. he had less than ninety minutes before first light. But, for now, the challenge was the opposite. For as long as Pellegrin has been doing his best work, he has been quietly battling glaucoma. Without his eyedrops, Pellegrin’s optic nerve would deteriorate under pressure inside his eyes the blackness that occludes his peripheral vision would continue to encroach.
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How to photograph this sacred darkness? He didn’t yet know, although he’d been grappling with some version of the problem for more than twenty years. Photograph by Christopher Anderson / Magnum for The New Yorker “There was this family imperative that you had to express yourself,” Pellegrin said. Jagged, broken, towering, ancient-“a sacred little graveyard for all time,” he said. He crept toward the middle of the pan to study the shape of the trees. “It’s not a silent silence-it’s very pregnant,” he said. Pellegrin hesitated for a moment at the edge of the clay. The trees died, but the roots were so deep, and the air so dry, that they stayed standing, mummified, atop a layer of solid white clay, in a basin of bright-orange dunes. Then, six or seven hundred years ago, there was no more water to reach. A grove of trees developed taproots, pushing a hundred feet down into the sand to search for water as the river disappeared. Here, a thousand years ago, a river snaked from the Naukluft Mountains, through the desert, to the Atlantic Ocean, fifty miles west. Nearby was a brown hyena, sensed but not yet seen.Īfter a half-mile hike, we reached the edge of the Deadvlei Pan. Individual particles cascaded in front of us, refracting light from the headlamps-tiny droplets, seen but not quite felt. Here there was no sky a thick fog obscured it. Pellegrin handed me a flash and a tripod, and we set off on foot into the dunes. An hour later, Anthony parked in the sand.

“To find silence, you need silence,” Pellegrin had observed, and as we drove in darkness no one spoke.
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Windows down, eyes straining, Anthony set off slowly in the direction of the dunes, which were visible only by the absence of stars behind them. The darkness was a gift-not only for Pellegrin’s photographic objective but also for sneaking into the heart of the park at night. But he didn’t turn on the lights until we were well out of sight of the ranger station at the entrance of Namib-Naukluft National Park. The driver, a guide named Anthony, shifted the Toyota into gear. There are days when he takes no pictures, but there are no days when he can afford to miss a dose.īag zipped, trunk closed, Pellegrin climbed into the passenger seat and gently shut his door.

“I almost never forget this,” he told me. He pulled out a small plastic vial of medicine, broke off the top, and put a drop in each eye. With the aid of a headlamp, Pellegrin fumbled through his bag. The sky was a void except for millions of stars. M., on January 10th, Paolo Pellegrin, the Italian photographer and winner of ten World Press Photo awards, was loading his gear into the back of a Toyota truck on the edge of the Namib Desert. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Īt 2:30 A.
