In the Middle of Nowhere.

Taken over six years in northwestern Saudi Arabia, these photographs explore the breathtaking beauty of a remote, demanding landscape, where camel herding, roadside encounters and traces of home reveal the everyday life within its vast expanses.

For more than six years, I lived and worked in northwestern Saudi Arabia, near the border with Jordan. During journeys through its mountains, deserts and scattered settlements, I began photographing the places and encounters that drew my attention. All the photographs in this series were taken with an analogue camera on 35mm film.

The places I photographed were often difficult to reach, with no established tourist routes. Distances were vast, conditions harsh, and encounters with people infrequent. Homes and roadside buildings were modest, offering shelter within an exposed landscape. Beyond them, rock formations, shifting sand and changing light gave the surroundings an almost otherworldly appearance. This extraordinary beauty often seemed unremarked upon, part of the ordinary setting in which life continued.

My attention moved between these different scales. A road disappears into mountains; a small figure stands against an eroded rock face. Camels gather beneath a tree, travel in the back of a pickup or turn towards the camera. A car rests beside a house and a towering outcrop. Inside a roofless pink room, a mirror and scattered belongings suggest a domestic life whose circumstances remain outside the photograph.

These encounters gradually changed my experience of remoteness. What initially felt unfamiliar acquired particular associations: a bend in a road, a solitary tree, a building beneath the rocks. The landscape became more legible through repeated journeys and through noticing how people and animals moved within it, finding shade, shelter and routes between places.

Working with 35mm film gave these observations a deliberate rhythm. With a limited number of exposures, I paused over moments that might otherwise have passed unnoticed. The photographs retain that movement between travelling and stopping, between looking into the distance and attending to something close at hand.

The title, In the Middle of Nowhere, describes a feeling I brought to these places when I first encountered them. Over time, that phrase became less certain. Even where people were out of sight, there were paths, vehicles, homes and signs of use. The photographs follow this growing familiarity, holding together the striking beauty of the terrain and the modest, sometimes unexpected details of everyday life.