Doug Haight: Wandering the Sahara

Doug Haight is a wanderer.  Especially with camera in hand, he loves to walk and explore new places, especially locations that are remote, off the beaten path and far from his home.  He finds inspiration across the tracks, down long dead end streets and alone in nature.  Wandering the Sahara grew out of a trip to Morocco in 2020.  Far from the bustling medinas of Fez and Marrakech, the Sahara Desert at dawn drew him in to its stark beauty and ephemeral nature.  He was struck by the feeling of a place that is the same as it was one thousand years ago, yet different than last year or even last week or last night.  It is alive with the potential to shift, grow and bury what it pleases.  ‘Swallowed by the desert’, as the saying goes.  He felt it. 

These immense outlines emerged seemingly insurmountable and endless.  All sky and sand with waves of texture and grandeur.  Scale blurred by stillness.  Forms and lines appeared, daring him to explore them within a frame.  These endless curves led his eye to the bluest heavens and the darkest shadows. He came across wooden poles seemingly set in as straight of a line as the desert would allow.  Could they have been a fence?  Here?  Even together they would not keep anything in or out, yet their line echoes the flow of dunes, as if someone had set them there for him to photograph only to remove them that very night.   

The Sahara captivates like nothing you can imagine.  He has never felt as if he had only barely scratched the surface of the extent of a place as he did walking away from the Sahara Desert.  If he were to return every year or even every month, he is certain that it would appear different every time and he would feel something different every time and he would capture something different every time.  He typically photographs people and street photography because he finds them full of life yet impossible to fully capture in any single frame.  With the Sahara, he found the same mysteries in what might seem simple.