Once is a project I photographed on film a long time ago while traveling through Namibia. I found these scans while going through an old hard-drive. I was taken aback about how good these images looked as raw scans. There is something about analogue film’s colour depth and saturation, as well as its deeper dynamic range. More than the technical aspects of these images, I’m taken aback by what they stirred within me.
I was young then and my brothers were children still. Almost all of our family trips were road trips and these images are a product of the monotony of the road and my day dreaming while staring through a car window. The Namib desert is a place where time has stood still. As the oldest desert on Earth and with one of the lowest human population densities, the landscape is seemingly unchanged and frozen in time. Human signs are ephemeral here. Footsteps last only minutes on the dunes and all other signs will all vanish too. These photographs are about a fleeting time in my life and of memories made and forgotten in a place where time stands still. Some things change while others remain the same.
