UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD

Through Worlds That Have Ended

Some places struggle to say goodbye. Long after the last departure, they continue to hold the shape of a life that has gone: a room still turned towards its window, a staircase rising towards an empty landing, the hull of a ship resting where its voyage ended. Sand crosses the threshold. Salt enters the iron. The wind moves through streets that no longer hear a human voice. Yet something persists. These places seem reluctant to release the people who built them, inhabited them, and gave them a reason to exist.

Until the End of the World follows this lingering attachment between place and life through Namibia and Angola. Dead Vlei, the Skeleton Coast, Kolmanskop and Ilha dos Tigres belong to different histories, yet each preserves the visible form of a world that has ended. Together, they become the chapters of a photographic journey towards the edge of the inhabited world, and into the fragile relationship between what disappears and what remains.

We bring a living human presence into that relationship.

The models are central to the work. Through breath, gesture, skin and movement, they enter into a dialogue with places suspended after the departure of life. A hand rests beside a doorway through which others once passed. A figure stands among trees that no longer grow. A body receives the wind beside a ship that will never sail again. For the duration of the photograph, the distance between presence and absence becomes something we can see.

These are landscapes whose images have travelled the world. Their beauty is already familiar; their meaning asks us to stay longer. Working with the models allows us to approach them through the experience of being alive: exposure, solitude, desire, endurance, the need for shelter, the difficulty of leaving. The human story runs alongside the story of each place, sometimes meeting it in a gesture so slight that the whole image depends upon it.

Dead Vlei — The Memory of Water

At Dead Vlei, that encounter begins with the memory of water. The pale clay pan and the dark, standing trees preserve the traces of an environment that once sustained a different abundance of life. Surrounded by immense red dunes, their stillness feels almost outside the present. Among them, the models introduce warmth and movement into a landscape held in suspension. The curve of a shoulder answers a dry branch; a shadow crosses the white ground; a breathing figure stands where growth has ceased. Photography brings these different conditions of existence into the same moment.

The Skeleton Coast — The Remains of Voyages

On the Skeleton Coast, the encounter takes place beside the remains of voyages. The Atlantic carries mist across the shore, revealing and concealing the wrecks it has left behind. Those broken hulls once contained work, routine, expectation: people keeping watch, crossing oceans, believing in an arrival. Now iron opens to the weather and sand gathers where water once passed beneath a keel. Against their immense, damaged forms, the models stand within the same wind that is slowly dismantling them. The living body and the exhausted vessel share a brief exposure to the elements.

Kolmanskop — Rooms Waiting for Life

At Kolmanskop, absence retains an intimate, domestic scale. It has bedrooms, corridors, doorframes, a particular way of receiving the afternoon light. Sand rises across floors built for footsteps and gathers beneath windows once opened by someone’s hand. The houses still seem to expect their inhabitants. Working with the models in these rooms brings the human presence close to that expectation: a pause at a threshold, a turn towards the light, the quiet occupation of a space that has waited without knowing it was waiting. For an instant, the architecture appears to remember how to shelter a life.

Ilha dos Tigres — An Island After Departure

The journey continues into Angola, towards Ilha dos Tigres and the abandoned settlement of São Martinho dos Tigres. Here the separation becomes physical: water between island and mainland, distance between a town and the world that once sustained it. Houses, streets, the church and the remains of the fishing industry endure together, preserving the outline of a community after its departure. We arrive at a place where an entire way of living has become a landscape. Among its empty structures, the models return a human rhythm to the scene — footsteps, breath, the movement of a body through light — while the sea continues around them.

The four places carry four different forms of an ending: an environment changed, a voyage interrupted, a town abandoned, an island settlement left behind. Our photographs follow the life that remains attached to those endings. They ask how a place continues to hold its past, and what happens when a living person enters that suspended relationship.

There is tenderness in this work, as well as grandeur. It asks for attention to the smallest gesture within an immense landscape, to the vulnerability of skin beside iron, to the way a room can seem less empty because someone has stood in its light.

We travel to the end of the world, through worlds that have ended, carrying the most temporary of presences: our own. And through the living body, we attempt, for the length of an image, to give breath again to what no longer lives.

How the Idea Began

This expedition grew from a conversation that returned, in different forms, over many years of landscape workshops and photographic journeys. Participants would stand before a place they had come to photograph — a coastline, a desert, an abandoned structure, a horizon held by weather and light — and ask a simple question: what might happen if there were someone there?

They were not looking for an accessory, nor for a fashion image placed in an extraordinary landscape. They wanted to extend their own photographic language. Many knew how to work with distance, silence, weather, form and light, but had never worked with a model. They wanted to understand how a human figure could enter a landscape with care: how to begin a dialogue, how to direct without imposing, and how to make an image in which the body and the place remain equally necessary.

From those recurring questions came the idea for this expedition.

Absence and Presence — Two Ways of Listening to the Same Places

The work unfolds through two distinct times.

The time of absence belongs first to the place itself. Before the models enter the frame, we walk, observe, wait and photograph each location in its solitude: the trees of Dead Vlei, the wrecks and mist of the Skeleton Coast, the rooms of Kolmanskop, the streets and shore of Ilha dos Tigres. The landscape is not a backdrop waiting to be completed. It already holds its own history, its own silence, its own image.

Then comes the time of presence.

We return to the same places with the models. Their presence does not fill an emptiness or make the landscape more decorative. It allows another relationship to appear: a living body beside what has endured after life has withdrawn; breath beside iron; skin beside salt; a gesture moving through rooms, dunes and wind.
Each participant works within a small, attentive structure: one model for every two photographers. This creates time for concentration, dialogue and the development of an individual visual language. It gives each photographer the space to observe, to work with care, to make images in solitude, and to let an encounter develop rather than forcing it.
The expedition therefore moves continuously between absence and presence: the place without us, and the place transformed by a living human figure. They are not two separate projects. They are two ways of listening to the same places.