The American West had occupied my imagination long before I ever set foot there.
Its deserts, highways, forgotten towns and endless horizons belonged to a mythology I had carried with me since childhood. In December 2018, I travelled across Arizona, Nevada and California, moving through landscapes that felt at once familiar and impossibly distant. Yet this body of work is not about the American West itself. It is about what certain places awaken within us.
For years I have been drawn to vast open spaces. Deserts, oceans, remote roads and empty horizons have always offered me something I struggle to find elsewhere: silence, perspective and the possibility of transformation. Within these landscapes, movement becomes reflection. Distance becomes a way of seeing.
The photographs gathered here were made during a journey that unfolded somewhere between travel and pilgrimage. The road became a temporary home; the landscape a mirror. What I encountered was not simply a geography of deserts and mountains, but a geography of longing, memory and desire.
I am not interested in describing a place objectively, nor in constructing a documentary account of the region. These photographs do not seek to explain the American West. Instead, they explore the emotional territory that exists between belonging and estrangement, between departure and arrival, between the places we inhabit and the places we imagine.
The images move between the real and the dreamlike. A motel room, a distant storm, abandoned objects, desert vegetation, fragments of human presence, and traces of lives briefly encountered along the way. Together they form a visual sequence that can be read less as a narrative than as a meditation — a collection of moments suspended between certainty and possibility.
At its heart, this work reflects on a question that has accompanied me throughout much of my life: where do we belong?
For some, home is a fixed point. For others, it is something constantly searched for, reinvented and carried within. These photographs emerge from that search.
What remains outside the frame may ultimately be more important than what is shown. The open road, after all, has never been merely about reaching a destination. It is about the freedom to keep moving toward a place that perhaps does not yet exist — and yet somehow already feels like home.
