Ballads from the End of the Desert

The Karoo is a semi-desert region at the heart of South Africa: a haunting, whimsical landscape that seems to stretch on forever.

It struck me as a dichotomy: it lies at the historical and geographic centre of the country, yet was long perceived as a frontier and is now dismissed as periphery.

I discovered the Karoo at a time of personal disorientation, when my usual ways of interpreting the world felt unreliable. That vulnerability made the landscape's apparent emptiness confrontational rather than soothing, exposing how little I understood about the histories that shaped it. My training as an architect, which normally provides a framework for reading space, proved inadequate: the Karoo is organised not by design but by centuries of colonisation, power, and adaptation.

This was Khoisan land — home to some of the oldest living communities on earth — long before Dutch and British settlers pushed inland from the Cape, and before apartheid codified dispossession into the ground itself: townships, fences, and farm boundaries that still divide the landscape today — and are being redrawn still, as farms become fenced game reserves and laws written to protect become instruments of expulsion.

Photography became a way of learning, a method for tracing how this history persists in land use, settlement patterns, and the fragile infrastructures that hold communities together.

The Karoo’s scale and isolation amplify patterns, making visible traces that persist in the landscape and speak to broader South African realities: inequality, land, old power structures. Many experience it as an empty, hot, arid space to be crossed on the way to somewhere else. By following roads and people, I sought to understand not only what is immediately present but also what endures quietly across generations.

In Graaff-Reinet I met Johan, sporting a Mona Lisa t-shirt while making his way through the thick paths of his succulent nursery, one of the biggest in the world. Once a criminal law lawyer sent to the Karoo to defend freedom fighters, the toll of a life spent beside vicious crimes made him cut ties with the world. He is waiting to abandon still more — to leave behind even his last possessions — yearning for the day the man who inhabits the house he bought in Nieu-Bethesda will die.

Ballads from the End of the Desert is a work of geographic observation: an atlas of places and stories tied together by the ephemeral, the wild, the unknown — a space where the boundary of reality intertwines with magic, dreamers, and loners. It is an attempt to make perceptible the ways history, memory, and power are inscribed into space, and to explore how belonging is negotiated in a landscape that resists full control.