The Great Karoo, or land of thirst, is a semi-desert natural region in South Africa with no apparent clear boundaries. It formed an impenetrable barrier for the Europeans settlers, a frightening place of great heat, frosts, floods, and droughts: a “Place of Great Dryness”.

Few years ago, I urged an escape. I embarked in a road trip in the Karoo, an area I hadn’t explored yet.

What I discovered in those days, changed the way I use the photographic medium. On the second day of that first trip, we met Johan in Graff-Reinet, sporting a hippie like Mona Lisa t-shirt while making his way through the thick path of his succulent nursery, one of the biggest in the world.

I had to pursue a feeling Johan and the Karoo gave me.

“This story sounds a bit unbelievable, but it happened a very long time ago. It happened before there were towns like Graff-Reinet or Nieu-Bethesda. Before there were farms and permanent settlements. It happened when people were the intruders and the land belonged to the wild.”

A haunting, biblical landscape that seems to sweep on forever. In the Karoo, South Africa’s troubled history emerges in an atlas of places and stories tied together by the ephemeral, the wild, the unknown. A space frozen in time where the boundary of reality intertwines with magic, a time for dreamers and loners, amid a seven-year-long drought that is taking a hard toll on the people, the animals, the land.

In Victoria West, packs of nervous amateur players sweep like locusts a dry golf course where motor oil is poured around holes to make the putting green, black circles in the scorched earth. Out of town, actual swarms of locusts thicken the air. In Nieu-Bethesda, a feared God shines out of the biblical sculpted world of Helen Martin, who converted her family home into a unique fantasy, the Owl House.

Ballads from the End of the Desert is a visual exploration of this biblical land at the heart of South Africa.