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Departs 08 November 2027
§ 50° 54' S, 73° 24' W — Expedition
ATLAS OF THE LAST LIGHT
Atacama — Patagonia, Chile
Departs · 08 November 2027 · 21 days
Participants · 6 · Spots remaining 2
From the high desert of Atacama to the far southern edges of Patagonia, this twenty-one-day expedition follows a long vertical line through Chile: salt, volcanic stone, dry air, glaciers, wind and ocean. It is a journey through territories where scale continually alters the human measure.
The work is not about collecting dramatic views. It is about learning to remain long enough for a place to become complex: to read light, weather, geology and silence as parts of a single visual field. Through field practice, conversation and editing, each participant builds an authored body of work shaped by the changing relationship between earth, distance and time.
§ 01
Archaeology of silence
Where the earth seems to end, photography begins again. A photographic expedition along the most vertiginous axis of Chile, from mining towns swallowed by the desert to the abandoned estancias of the Strait of Magellan. Twenty-one days among forgotten railways, salt flats, volcanoes, wrecks, and mountains that seem to belong to another planet. We will not pursue only the great landscapes, but the traces left by man in the places from which man has disappeared. A journey dedicated to light, to distance, and to the construction of a personal photographic narrative.
§ 02
Two photographic quotes
To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life.
Some photographs are like a Chekhov short story. They're quick things and there's a whole world in them.
— Henri Cartier-Bresson
These two quotations define the vision of the workshop: to photograph with attention and awareness, but also to learn to build images in which the visible suggests that which remains outside the frame.
§ 03
The journey
There are territories that seem to await photography. Chile is one of these: a thin line of land stretched for over four thousand kilometres between the Andes Cordillera and the Pacific Ocean. To the north, the Atacama preserves desiccated industrial towns, theatres without audiences, cemeteries in the sand, and railways that end in nothingness. To the south, the Patagonian pampa leads toward fjords, estancias, wrecks, and mountains that the wind reveals and conceals in the space of a few minutes.
"Atlas of the Last Light" traverses these two extremes as though they were chapters of a single story: desert and ice, the blinding immobility of the north and the atmospheric instability of the south.
The expedition begins on the Pacific coast, among the wooden architectures of Iquique and Pisagua, an ancient nitrate port wedged between the ocean and a wall of desert. It continues through the oficinas salitreras of Humberstone, Santa Laura, and Chacabuco: industrial communities born around nitrate extraction, connected by a railway network and then almost completely abandoned.
Humberstone and Santa Laura represent today the most accomplished testimony of a mining civilisation that involved Chilean, Peruvian, and Bolivian workers. The complex was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2005; the UNESCO documentation recalls that more than two hundred plants were once connected by a purpose-built railway.
From the industrial ruins we will move toward San Pedro de Atacama. Here the landscape will progressively lose every human measure: salt crusts, red and turquoise lagoons, clay cordilleras, volcanoes, fumaroles, and night skies of exceptional clarity. Geology will become architecture; light, matter.
An internal flight will then take us to the other end of the country. At Punta Arenas the second chapter will begin: the Strait of Magellan, the ports, the monumental cemeteries, Estancia San Gregorio with its agro-industrial structures, the railway remains, and two ships wrecked on the coast.
The journey will end among Puerto Bories, Sierra Baguales, and Torres del Paine. Here it will no longer be possible to dominate the landscape: one will have to learn to wait for it. The wind, the clouds, and the rain will decide when to grant the mountain.
This is not a race between famous places. It is an itinerant workshop on landscape, on industrial memory, and on the idea of absence. Each participant will be accompanied in the construction of a coherent project: not a collection of views, but a sequence capable of becoming a portfolio, a book, or an exhibition.
§ 04
The chosen period
The expedition runs from 8 to 28 November 2027. It is the best seasonal compromise between the two extremes of Chile: in the Atacama, days are generally temperate and the nights less severe than in the austral winter; the Patagonian spring offers longer days, residual snow on the mountains, and a light still grazing and low; Torres del Paine is fully accessible, but has not yet reached the crowding of December and January; weather changes remain frequent and can produce exceptional photographic conditions.
§ 05
The educational vision
The workshop is intended for intermediate or advanced photographers, but remains open to emerging authors motivated to develop a personal language. It is not tied to a brand or to any particular equipment. Its aim is not to teach a succession of technical formulas, but rather to help each participant recognise what they are searching for and transform it into a visual narrative.
The five lines of work: reading the territory — observing a landscape before photographing it, among history, geology, climate, and human traces; building a voice — identifying one's own project axis among industrial archaeology, alien landscape, architectures of abandonment, railways, borders, water, wind, or memory; working in sequences — alternating descriptive images, details, environmental portraits, landscapes, and transitional photographs; photographing time — dawn, grazing light, contre-jour, overcast skies, night, and long exposure as narrative tools; editing and giving form — recognising recurrences, eliminating redundancies, and building a final selection of 12–20 photographs.
What the teaching includes: editorial briefing before departure; preliminary online portfolio review; field tutoring; individual and collective exercises; introduction to night landscape photography; work on architecture and industrial archaeology; environmental portrait when possible and culturally appropriate; evening editing sessions; two individual reviews during the expedition; final editing; a follow-up online meeting within six weeks of return.
§ 06
Less frequented places and industrial archaeology
The journey deliberately includes locations outside the most conventional circuits: the port and former railway station of Pisagua; La Noria, subject to permits and safety; the Andean village of Mamiña; the Oficina Salitrera Chacabuco; the railway junction of Baquedano; the port outskirts of Punta Arenas; Estancia San Gregorio and its wrecks; Laguna Blanca and the internal pampa; Sierra Baguales; the industrial complex of Puerto Bories. No abandoned site will be reached through clandestine access. The preservation of the places and the safety of the group take precedence over any photograph.
§ What You Will Learn
What You Will Learn
A railway disappearing into the Atacama and a wreck on the Strait of Magellan belong to different landscapes. Yet both carry the outline of a journey that has stopped. Across Chile, we will learn to recognise such connections and build a photographic project capable of travelling between them.
Choosing a line of enquiry
Industrial memory, water, abandonment, distance or the traces of work may become the thread of your expedition. Through field conversations and individual reviews, you will learn to test that thread against what you encounter, refining it as the photographs develop.
We will move among wider descriptions, architectural studies, details and encounters with inhabited places. Each image should contribute a particular observation, rather than merely announce another destination.
Photographing built and geological form
In the nitrate towns, you will study alignment, camera height and the relationship between machinery, streets and domestic spaces. We will work with focal length and perspective to retain the character of a room or structure without relying on exaggerated distortion.
Farther inland, salt, rock and open distance require another sense of scale. You will learn to organise sparse compositions, judge the importance of a foreground and use longer lenses to study forms that are difficult to separate in a wide view. Exposure and focus will be considered through the materials themselves, from reflective salt to dark industrial interiors.
Light at opposite ends of the journey
The northern and southern sections will give us different problems to solve. We will work with strong light, backlit steam and large brightness differences in the Atacama, then respond to moving cloud, wind and rain in Patagonia.
Tripod practice, shutter speed, polarising and neutral-density filters will be tied to clear visual purposes. During the scheduled night work, you will practise focusing in darkness and choosing an exposure that relates the sky to the ground. In changing weather, we will learn to prepare a composition and recognise the brief conditions that allow it to work.
An atlas with a personal order
Daily selections will help you see connections while there is still time to develop them in the field. We will examine colour, repetition, transitions and the balance between historical context and visual suggestion.
Your final sequence of twelve to twenty photographs will give the journey an order beyond the itinerary. Whether it develops towards a portfolio, book or exhibition, the work should reveal a sustained enquiry into what these places retain after their original purpose has changed.
§ The Itinerary
The Itinerary
§ Phase 01
Arrival · Santiago
The meridian of departure
Santiago lies between two walls of stone: the Andes to the east, still white in November, and the coastal range to the west. In the late afternoon we climb Cerro Santa Lucía, a rock turned into a garden of stairways and balustrades, and look down on the city we are about to leave. Lastarria at dusk: balconies, cafés, a first photograph. The country is four thousand kilometres long, and tonight we stand in the middle of it.
§ Phase 02
The nitrate coast
Santiago to Iquique
The houses of Calle Baquedano were built of pine that came from Oregon in the holds of sailing ships, which left again loaded with nitrate. Porticoes, carved balconies, façades faded by a century of sun. In the evening, the port: cranes, fishing boats, pelicans on the piers, and the Pacific turning to lead.
Pisagua, a city between two voids
The road drops down a cliff of dust towards the ocean. Pisagua has its back against a wall of desert and its face in the sea: a theatre with no audience, a station with no trains, a clock tower keeping time for a handful of houses. The salt wind has sanded every door. Nothing here is finished, and nothing has quite gone.
Humberstone and Santa Laura
A town left exactly as it stopped. The theatre still has its seats, the school its desks, the swimming pool its iron walls, and the streets still wait for the evening shift. We enter at opening, before anyone else. In the afternoon, Santa Laura: the tall leaching plant of timber and iron, creaking in the wind above the pampa.
La Noria and Mamiña
La Noria is a nitrate town the maps have forgotten, and its cemetery lies open to the sky, the desert slowly lifting what was buried. We go only with a local fixer and with permission. In the afternoon we climb to Mamiña, an Andean village of terraces and hot springs, where water was healing the tired long before the nitrate came.
§ Phase 03
The desert interior
Chacabuco, the geometric city
A city drawn with a ruler in the middle of nothing. Streets at right angles, a theatre, a square, rows of workers' houses, and the great industrial structures standing alone on the plain. There is no noise at all. The silence here is geometric.
Baquedano and the desert railway
Dawn at Chacabuco, the shadows of the houses stretched across the streets. Then Baquedano, where the lines of the desert met: rusted locomotives, sheds, water towers, rails running straight into the horizon. In the late afternoon the road climbs towards San Pedro de Atacama, and the air begins to thin.
§ Phase 04
Atacama
San Pedro and the Cordillera de la Sal
The morning belongs to the altitude: we walk slowly, drink water, and let the blood learn two thousand four hundred metres. In the afternoon, the Cordillera de la Sal, ridges of salt and clay carved by the wind into amphitheatres and dunes. At sunset the Valle de la Luna turns from gold to violet, and then to nothing.
El Tatio and Termas de Puritama
We leave in the dark and climb to four thousand three hundred metres. At dawn the earth breathes: columns of steam rise out of the frost at El Tatio, lit from behind by the first sun, and vanish. On the way down, Puritama: hot water running through a gorge of reeds, and eight pools to sit in while the cold leaves the body.
Salar de Atacama and the border villages
Toconao, built of white volcanic stone, and Socaire, with its terraces cut into the slope. Then the salt: a crust that cracks under the foot, lagoons of pure mirror, and flamingos walking on their own reflections. At sunset the volcanoes around the Salar de Atacama blush, one after another.
Piedras Rojas and the altiplanic lagoons
Above four thousand metres, colour stops obeying. Miscanti and Miñiques, two lagoons of cobalt at the feet of their volcanoes. Piedras Rojas: red rock edged with white salt beside water the colour of jade. After dinner, at the observatory where we sleep, the sky of the Atacama.
§ Phase 05
Transition
Atacama to Punta Arenas
Three thousand kilometres south in an afternoon. We leave the driest desert on earth and land where the wind never stops. The window of the plane, the waiting room, the coat you had forgotten you needed: all of it is part of the journey. In the evening, the first walk on the Strait of Magellan.
§ Phase 06
The Strait of Magellan
Punta Arenas, port and city of winds
Dawn on the Strait, then the cemetery: cypresses clipped into columns, marble mausoleums of the sheep barons, the merchants and the sailors. In the afternoon we drive south along the Strait, past Puerto del Hambre, where a Spanish colony starved to death, and Fuerte Bulnes, until the road runs out. A boat carries us the last stretch to the lighthouse of San Isidro. Wood stoves, a bath of hot sea water under the southern sky, and the Strait on every side.
Estancia San Gregorio
Dawn at the last lighthouse of the Americas, where the continent ends in water. Then the boat, and the long road north. In the afternoon, an estancia that was once a small town of wool, and on the beach two ships lying where the sea left them, the Amadeo and the Ambassador, turning to rust and lace with every tide.
§ Phase 07
The pampa
Laguna Blanca and the secondary pampa
Fences that run for days. A petrol station alone in the grass, sheep, rheas, guanacos, and a horizon that bends under the wind. In the late afternoon, Puerto Natales, on the edge of the fjord they named Last Hope.
Puerto Bories and Puerto Natales
A cold-storage plant built a century ago to freeze the meat of Patagonia and send it to Europe: chimneys, boilers, iron and brick, a national monument now. In the afternoon, the waterfront of Puerto Natales: piers, tin houses, boats, and the clouds racing over the Última Esperanza.
Sierra Baguales
Beyond the Paine, a valley almost nobody enters. Basalt towers, fossils in the rock, wild horses, and distances without a single sign. The least visited day of the journey, and perhaps the most silent.
§ Phase 08
Torres del Paine
The massif
We enter the park before dawn. Lago Sarmiento, Laguna Amarga, the white roar of Salto Grande, and above them the granite, appearing and disappearing in the cloud. Here the programme is written by the wind.
Water and ice
Lago Pehoé, turquoise beneath the horns of the Paine. The shore of Lago Grey, where blue icebergs run aground, and, when the weather allows, the boat towards the front of the glacier. In the evening, the Cuernos upside down in the water of Pehoé.
The day of waiting
One day kept free for what the mountain has not yet given. We go back to the place that stayed closed in cloud, and we wait. In the afternoon, Puerto Natales and the last edit: twelve to twenty photographs each.
§ Phase 09
Return
Puerto Natales to Santiago
Dawn on the Última Esperanza, one last time. Then the flight north to Santiago. The expedition ends here. The work begins.
§ 06
Accommodation
Wait until you see where we sleep.
I did not choose these places from a list. I chose them one by one, because each of them is already a piece of the journey: we photograph a world by day, and at night we go back inside it.
We begin in Santiago, in The Singular, in the old quarter of Lastarria, after the long flight a bed that asks nothing of you. In Iquique we sleep in Casa Baquedano, an old mansion on the very street of Oregon pine we will photograph at dawn, the ocean half a block away; from here we go out before first light to Pisagua and to the nitrate towns, and come back each evening to the same house. At Mamiña, the hot springs of the Andean village take three days of nitrate out of the body. And at Chacabuco we sleep in the desert itself, in a camp raised for us alone beside the geometric city, so that at dawn the dead streets are a few steps from the tent.
In San Pedro de Atacama we live in two houses of the desert. First Alto Atacama, built of stone and adobe in the valley of Catarpe, at the foot of the Cordillera de la Sal: three nights of silence for the body learning altitude, before the geysers at dawn. Then two nights at El Observatorio, in the ayllu of Solor, houses of adobe, straw and native wood beside an astronomical observatory. There the kitchen is mine. I cook for the group, and after dinner we step outside, the telescope is waiting, and the sky of the Atacama begins at the door.
In Punta Arenas we sleep in the Palacio Sara Braun, the house of the woman who was queen of the wool and of half of Patagonia. By day we photograph her mausoleum in the cemetery; at night we climb her staircase. One night we leave the city and go to the end of the road, and then beyond it, by boat, to the lighthouse of San Isidro, the last on the continent: wood stoves, a bath of hot sea water, and the Strait of Magellan on every side.
Crossing the pampa we stop at Estancia Río Verde, a sheep station founded in the nineteenth century that still works as it always has. In Puerto Natales we sleep inside the old cold-storage plant of Puerto Bories, now The Singular Patagonia, among the boilers and machines left where they stood. At Estancia Cerro Guido, with the gauchos, we wake on the land from which we enter the Sierra Baguales. In Torres del Paine, one night at Tierra Patagonia, on the shore of Lago Sarmiento, with the massif in the windows. And one night on the island of Lago Pehoé, in the white house joined to the shore by a footbridge, the one everyone knows from photographs, with the horns of the Paine in front of us. The rooms there are simple. The view is not.
We end where the journey became home, at The Singular, for the last edit and the last dinner.
Some of these nights are comfortable, and some are raw. I wanted both. The first give you the strength for the dawn; the others give you the memory.
Final choices are confirmed with each participant before departure.
§ Photo Gear
Photo Gear
Chile asks two opposite things of the same bag. First it must survive the driest place on earth; ten days later, the wettest wind. I will tell you what each end of the country does to equipment, and then you will decide.
What the desert breaks
The dust of the Atacama is not sand. It is a powder of salt and clay finer than flour, and the wind lays it into the rings of a zoom and onto a sensor in the second a lens comes off. Here lenses are changed inside the vehicle, back to the wind, camera facing the ground. On the salar the crust is brine underneath: a tripod that has stood in it must have its legs rinsed with fresh water the same evening, or within a week the clamps no longer open. At El Tatio, at dawn, it is five below zero at four thousand three hundred metres: batteries lose half their life in minutes, and the steam of the geysers settles on the front glass and freezes there.
What the south breaks
In Patagonia the wind is the programme. A tripod with its legs fully extended becomes a sail, and a camera left on it for the time it takes to turn round is a camera on the ground. You work low, legs wide, a weight hanging from the column, and you never step away from it. Then the rain comes sideways, and the spray of Salto Grande and of the boat to the glacier: the front glass must be wiped before every frame.
What I bring, and will not use
In the van there is a second camera body, and a spare tripod, for the day someone hears that sound, a camera falling on rock, and their journey either ends there or does not. There is a long lens for the guanacos, the flamingos and the horses of Baguales, for whoever left theirs at home. And there is the rest of the cave: large-format cameras, a panoramic 6×17 that the salar and the pampa seem to have been made for, and filters for every sky from the desert to the ice.
What each of you decides alone
About your own bag I have nothing to teach you. I will only say that whatever is slow, film, large format, an instant camera, finds here the right places and the right time. If you bring film, tell me: there are four domestic flights, and each scanner must be asked, politely, to look by hand. If your project rests on unusual equipment, let me know as early as possible, so we can shape the days around it.
The list
For the evening you pack. One line for each thing, and for each thing a reason Chile will give you on the spot.
- A sturdy tripod, and the habit of rinsing its legs
- A release cable or remote: on the tripod the camera is not touched
- A monopod
- A second camera body, if you have one
- A wide angle, for the nitrate interiors and the salt horizons
- A long lens, which in the pampa you will use more than any other
- A fast lens, for the night sky
- A polariser, for salt, lagoons and the dark blue sky of altitude
- Neutral density filters of 6 and 10 stops, and a graduated filter
- Thin photography gloves that work on a touchscreen, such as DIRTY RIGGER
- Spare batteries, in the inside pocket, against the body
- Memory cards in duplicate, and a drive for the evening backup
- A blower, sensor swabs and four microfibre cloths
- A rain cover for body and lens
- A head torch with a red light, for the pre-dawn departures and the stars
- A DOMKE bag emptied of its padding, and a PELI hard case for the flights
Tripods and monopods
A tripod is stillness: the sharpest print, precision to the millimetre, and one frame that stays put while teacher and student take turns at the finder. A monopod is the other half: a second arm, up to ten feet long, that carries the camera above a crowd, an inch off the salt, over a railing at El Tatio, out beyond the rail of a boat. I recommend the MANFROTTO 055 in carbon fibre, not because it is the best that exists, but because the salt and the wind of Chile treat a tripod three times the price in exactly the same way.
The bag
Not the rucksack. In the desert there is nowhere to set it down: the ground is brine, dust or rock that cuts. In Patagonia, whatever is opened in the wind flies. One bag only, carried under the arm, from which a lens comes out without the bag leaving your shoulder. For the flights and the long roads, a hard case, sealed against dust and knocks.
Ziplock
Two small secrets. ZIPLOCK bags, two for every piece, against the powder of the desert and the rain of the south. BONGO TIES, to hold down cables and covers the wind wants to take. And a thermal blanket, folded among the bags: at El Tatio, before dawn, first for you, then for the camera.
What we bring for you
Medium format to pick up and use, including the HASSELBLAD X2D II 100C. A complete set of LEE filters and matte boxes, SEKONIC light and colour meters, a COLORCHECKER. And the odd view camera or panoramic film camera emerging from Luca's cases: they are part of the journey too.
Need a spare body, a lens, a tripod? Tell us before departure. Our enthusiasm is boundless; our luggage allowance, on four domestic flights, is not.
§ Personal Gear
Personal Gear
This is an expedition, and you arrive equipped for one.
What you bring
What we buy together
What we bring for you
Over the years we have put together a welcome package of the things that are easily forgotten or hard to arrange from abroad, packed in a waterproof dry bag: a local SIM card, and a loan phone if yours cannot take a second one; a Starlink satellite connection, set up wherever we are, for a call home from the end of the world; a walkie-talkie; a first-aid kit; a satellite locator beacon and an emergency flare for the desert days; a little local currency as pocket money; a laminated emergency sheet with every number you need; a compact phrasebook; pouches for your documents; and your own printed copy of our unique guide.
§ The Light Map
The Light Map
In the Atacama sector (the first part of November), sunrise falls near 06:40 and sunset near 19:50. The desert air is exceptionally dry and clear — night skies above San Pedro are among the darkest on earth, but this edition meets them under a bright moon: it grows to full on 14 November, so astrophotography belongs to the hours before moonrise, and the moon itself becomes a light for the salt flats and the volcanoes. At El Tatio (4,300 m), pre-dawn temperatures can drop to −5 °C; the geothermal steam is most photogenic in the first hour after dawn, with contre-jour backlighting. Salt crusts and lagoons are best in the low, grazing light of early morning and late afternoon; midday sun is harsh and flat. In the Patagonian sector (the second half of November), sunrise advances to near 05:45 and sunset extends past 21:20, granting very long working days; the moon wanes after last quarter on 21 November towards the new moon of 28 November, returning dark skies to the final nights. The Patagonian spring light is low and warm, with residual snow on the peaks. Torres del Paine alpenglow occurs near 06:00 on clear mornings — weather windows are short, and we move on the forecast, not the schedule. Wind, cloud, and sudden rain can transform conditions in minutes; overcast skies, though, are not a loss — they give even, diffuse light that flatters the granite towers and suppresses harsh contrast on ice and water.
In the first half of November, San Pedro de Atacama commonly ranges from around 4 °C at night to 25 °C by day, under an intense high-altitude sun. In southern Patagonia, the second half of the month is often around 3–14 °C, and the westerly wind is the constant: in Torres del Paine, gusts can exceed 80 km/h. These are seasonal ranges, not a forecast.
§ Safety & Accessibility
Safety & Accessibility
Across this journey, the conditions change as much as the landscape. A quiet walk through an industrial town, an excursion above four thousand metres and a windy morning beside a Patagonian lake make different demands on the body. Tell us before booking what you need, and keep that conversation open throughout the expedition.
Altitude and acclimatisation
The Atacama programme includes high-altitude outings, including El Tatio and the altiplanic lagoons. Being fit does not prevent altitude illness. Take the initial period at elevation gently, and discuss any relevant medical history with a clinician familiar with high-altitude travel before departure.
Tell the team promptly about headache, nausea, dizziness or unusual fatigue. Do not continue to a higher elevation while experiencing symptoms of altitude illness. Worsening symptoms require descent and medical assessment; confusion, difficulty walking normally or breathlessness at rest are emergencies. Nobody who is unwell should be left to make their own way down.
The acclimatisation time in the itinerary helps us approach these days more carefully, but it cannot guarantee that every participant will tolerate the same elevation. Any need to miss a high-altitude excursion and the available arrangements should be discussed with us in advance.
Industrial sites and geothermal ground
At former mining towns, railway sites and abandoned structures, remain within the areas opened to visitors and follow the local guide's instructions. Do not climb machinery, enter unstable rooms or step onto damaged floors for a photograph. Watch for broken glass, metal edges and changes in ground level, and keep your hands available for balance.
At El Tatio, stay on the designated paths and respect barriers around vents and pools. Steam can conceal the ground, and a surface that looks solid may not be safe. Settle your footing before looking through the camera; do not step backwards without first checking behind you.
Wind, cold and water
In Patagonia, carry layers and accessible protection from wind and rain, even when the morning begins quietly. Strong gusts can affect balance and catch an open vehicle door or an unattended tripod. Shorten the setup when necessary and keep equipment under control.
Around lakes, waterfalls and the coast, remain clear of exposed edges and slippery rocks. Follow the crew's instructions during any boat excursion and use the safety equipment they provide. A photographic position is only useful when you can occupy it securely.
Working at a sustainable pace
Wear supportive footwear and choose a camera bag you can carry comfortably on uneven ground. Keep water and sun protection close at hand, take breaks and tell me about tiredness, pain or discomfort before concentration makes them easy to ignore. Early starts and long field days can accumulate; choosing to rest is a legitimate part of managing the journey.
Remote locations may be some distance from medical care. Seek personal travel-health advice before departure and bring the medication and information you normally need. Insurance covering the itinerary, high-altitude excursions and possible medical evacuation is strongly recommended.
Accessibility and individual participation
The route includes uneven paths, steps, rough ground, vehicle access and locations where level entrances or nearby facilities cannot be assumed. Please tell us about mobility, balance, sensory or other access needs before booking so that we can review the actual demands of each stage with you.
Where a particular walk or viewpoint is unsuitable, we can discuss alternatives with the local team. The availability of an alternative depends on the location and arrangements; it should be established in advance wherever possible. The aim is to help you judge the journey honestly and participate with the attention and support your circumstances require.
§ Travel Conditions
Travel Conditions
The expedition begins and ends in Santiago, combining domestic flights with road travel through northern Chile and Patagonia. Rather than covering the full length of the country by road, we travel through each region overland and fly between the two main chapters of the journey.
From Santiago, a domestic flight takes us to Iquique. The northern route then continues by road through the coastal settlements, nitrate towns and desert interior towards San Pedro de Atacama. Excursions from this base take us into the surrounding landscapes, with suitable 4×4 transport for the highland outing to Piedras Rojas and the altiplanic lagoons.
At the end of the Atacama section, we transfer to Calama airport for the flight journey to Punta Arenas. In the south, road transfers connect the Strait of Magellan, the pampa, Puerto Natales and Torres del Paine. The programme also allows for a boat excursion towards Grey Glacier when it can operate. The final domestic flight returns us from Puerto Natales to Santiago.
Road days include time for meals, breaks and the visits set out in the itinerary. On airport days, the rhythm follows the booked flights and their connections. Exact flight details, meeting points, ground-transfer arrangements and luggage allowances will be provided in the pre-departure travel information, so that camera equipment and personal luggage can be packed accordingly.
§ After the Journey
After the Journey
After leaving the Atacama and Patagonia, where desert light and southern weather had taught the eye different forms of absence, the images need to be placed again among those who crossed that long Chilean axis together.
I did not include six months of post-workshop contact by chance, nor as a simple service.
Many years ago, I was teaching an online course that could easily have felt impersonal. Instead, when it ended, the group did not want to dissolve. We had never all sat around the same table, yet years later we are still a living community. From that experience came conversations, magazines, books, friendships and shared ways of looking.
It taught me how valuable a small circle of people can be when they have lived and worked through an experience together.
For this reason, every expedition includes six months of continued contact at no additional cost, and those months are where the photographs are carried to their end, together. A private group keeps the images moving between us: feedback, and a tuition that goes on, fed by cultural prompts — a book, an image, a thought, an exhibition, an occasion that opens a new direction. Each of you brings your images to a master file ready for fine print, and then we sit down, one to one, before the finished work. Then the group meets again, and there is a particular pleasure in it: seeing how far each of us has travelled since we parted. A Second Eye, an editor or a curator, reads the work as the profession reads it. And the work takes form, a collective book or a zine, depending on the event, and a public life, on a gallery wall or in the pages of Follow the Light. The images do not go back into a drawer. They go out into the world, and they go out together.
The event ends. The adventure in photography begins.
§ 04 — The Archive
Frames from Atacama — Patagonia, Chile
A selection of high-resolution frames captured on past expeditions. Select any image to view it full-size.