“The sun sets and rises. Though we try to tame it with the tick of our clock, it dances to the beat of the valley of the moon.”

In Bedouin traditions, when a baby is born, the father hunts a scorpion then burns and crushes it, mixes it with olive oil and applies it to the child’s body out of belief that the treatment will protect the infant from scorpions during their life.

These photographs are a scorpion for the desert. The image is captured and swayed in chemicals, then applied to her mind’s eye, out of the belief that the treatment will protect her from the wandering soles of humans throughout her life.

As talismans of her psychic realm, the images rupture forth from the true place of our collective dreams but are just as ephemeral in their shape-shifting layers, holding all that is light and dark in the delicate folds of the burning afternoon sun. Within the red seams of the earth, leaves bloom to the eternal secrets the dust holds buried. Ears blister in her rock, haunted by the shadow cast of a sandalled man. The shadow will be gone, but the sand will stay, until it too shifts, across the desert’s spine. 

- Text by Shana Chandra 

- View/purchase the book published by Guest Editions here
- Fisheye Magazine Feature