Dust and Shade

A series of images made in Niamey, Niger. Inspired by old masters landscapes, it is about city and natural, animals and humans, giving a sense of passing of time.

These photographs were made in Niamey, where the city expands slowly into sand, thorn trees, concrete walls, and open ground shaped equally by wind, animals, and human presence. The images move between intimacy and distance: a man seated in the shade of a fragile shelter, children crossing an empty field, goats wandering through dust, trees standing like witnesses older than memory itself.

The black-and-white images strip the scenes of spectacle and return attention to light, texture, gesture, and atmosphere. Dust becomes almost tangible. Shadows stretch across the ground like traces of passing hours. Human figures often appear small within the frame, not diminished, but connected to something larger: climate, land, history, and duration.

Rather than documenting events, the series lingers on intervals — moments where nothing dramatic occurs, yet everything feels suspended. A tree bends under its own age. Plastic debris catches the light. A road waits in silence. A man leans against a pole while shadows gather around him. These fragments speak about endurance, adaptation, solitude, and coexistence.

Niamey emerges here not simply as a place, but as a rhythm: slow, dry, luminous, and deeply marked by the passage of time. The city and its surroundings become a space where human life, animal life, and the landscape continuously reshape one another, leaving behind fragile signs that may soon disappear.