At 2:30 A.M., on January 10th, Paolo Pellegrin, the Italian photographer and winner of ten World Press Photo awards, was loading his gear into the back of a Toyota truck on the edge of the Namib Desert. The sky was a void except for millions of stars. With the aid of a headlamp, Pellegrin fumbled through his bag. He pulled out a small plastic vial of medicine, broke off the top, and put a drop in each eye. “I almost never forget this,” he told me. There are days when he takes no pictures, but there are no days when he can afford to miss a dose.
Bag zipped, trunk closed, Pellegrin climbed into the passenger seat and gently shut his door. The driver, a guide named Anthony, shifted the Toyota into gear. But he didn’t turn on the lights until we were well out of sight of the ranger station at the entrance of Namib-Naukluft National Park. The darkness was a gift—not only for Pellegrin’s photographic objective but also for sneaking into the heart of the park at night. Windows down, eyes straining, Anthony set off slowly in the direction of the dunes, which were visible only by the absence of stars behind them.
“To find silence, you need silence,” Pellegrin had observed, and as we drove in darkness no one spoke. An hour later, Anthony parked in the sand. Pellegrin handed me a flash and a tripod, and we set off on foot into the dunes. Here there was no sky; a thick fog obscured it. Individual particles cascaded in front of us, refracting light from the headlamps—tiny droplets, seen but not quite felt. Nearby was a brown hyena, sensed but not yet seen.
After a half-mile hike, we reached the edge of the Deadvlei Pan. Here, a thousand years ago, a river snaked from the Naukluft Mountains, through the desert, to the Atlantic Ocean, fifty miles west. A grove of trees developed taproots, pushing a hundred feet down into the sand to search for water as the river disappeared. Then, six or seven hundred years ago, there was no more water to reach. The trees died, but the roots were so deep, and the air so dry, that they stayed standing, mummified, atop a layer of solid white clay, in a basin of bright-orange dunes.
Pellegrin hesitated for a moment at the edge of the clay. “It’s not a silent silence—it’s very pregnant,” he said. He crept toward the middle of the pan to study the shape of the trees. Jagged, broken, towering, ancient—“a sacred little graveyard for all time,” he said.
How to photograph this sacred darkness? He didn’t yet know, although he’d been grappling with some version of the problem for more than twenty years. Without his eyedrops, Pellegrin’s optic nerve would deteriorate under pressure inside his eyes; the blackness that occludes his peripheral vision would continue to encroach. For as long as Pellegrin has been doing his best work, he has been quietly battling glaucoma. But, for now, the challenge was the opposite. It was after 4 A.M.; he had less than ninety minutes before first light.
Pellegrin and I are friends. We met on assignment for this magazine, in Chad, almost five years ago, when I was twenty-six and he was fifty-three. Since then, we have worked together several times, once sharing a cabin on an expedition vessel for ten days at sea. We’ve had dinners in Rome and Lisbon, and I’ve played tag with his eight- and twelve-year-old daughters in a park in Lausanne. Last fall, he designated me as a “second photo assistant,” so that I could accompany him to a shoot on the floor of the Ferrari factory, in Maranello, Italy. For two days, I held an L.E.D. lamp as he took portraits of mechanics and artisans in fire-retardant jumpsuits. It was a master class in craft, and he barked the names of the Dutch Masters whose paintings he sought to reflect. An order of “Rembrandt!” meant to cast the light diagonally down and across the face, so that one side was illuminated and the other was in muted shadow, hidden by the bridge of the nose, except for a streak of soft white light across the eye.
Pellegrin is six feet two “on a good day,” he says, and, as a young man, he trained in tennis and martial arts. But “with the full onset of maturity,” as he puts it, he is more focussed on “agility of the mind.” Last year, he cut short his graying hair, which for most of his life had curled past his ears. He is a voracious reader, obsessed with philosophy and death; often his most sincere arguments are expressed with a tinge of playful, self-deprecating irony. Although he is fluent in English, he reverts to Italian words when there is no precise equivalent. At home, he tinkers with puzzles and Rubik’s Cubes; some years ago, a Russian oligarch taught him how to construct memory palaces, placing individual thoughts in an imaginary, three-dimensional space, to be retrieved at will.
Pellegrin is also an avid chess player, and at some point last year he persuaded me to download a chess app on my phone. We now play against each other almost every day. Some games last for days, but I have never beaten him. Once, when I came close, he sent me a link to a humanities anthology, which noted that “there exists within the fields of mathematics and philosophy what is called the ‘infinite monkey theorem,’ stating that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter given an infinite amount of time will eventually write the completed works of William Shakespeare.”
The Ferrari job was the first time we’d seen each other in two years, owing to the pandemic, and in that time Pellegrin had been commissioned by the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin to produce a new body of work. The museum didn’t yet exist; it is launching this week, with Pellegrin’s show. The initial concept was to focus on climate change—slow, unrelenting, difficult to depict—but Pellegrin had grown weary of the idea. “It’s been done,” he told me.
Still, the idea of documenting extremity in nature appealed to him. Pellegrin has devoted most of his career to photographing war and the human condition. But in 2017 he spent a month flying over Antarctica, with a group of NASA pilots and scientists, and found that the scale, the emptiness, and the infinite took over his mind. The indifference of the planet to its own habitability was terrifying. It forced a recognition that one is “helpless against the might of nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in the face of enormous powers,” as one of Pellegrin’s favorite philosophers, Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote, in “The World as Will and Representation,” in 1818. Since his Antarctica trip, Pellegrin has walked among the burning embers of wildfires, floated on glassy waters in front of glaciers, climbed the steaming rims of volcanoes, and trudged through dreary coastal marshes. He has sweated through forests and jungles, and destroyed two cameras while photographing winter storms on a beach in Iceland, as huge, freezing waves crashed against the rocks at his feet. “It’s such a privilege, really, to be so close to something so powerful, so raw, and to feel and get a whiff of it—even be touched by it—and still get away,” Pellegrin told me.
On January 2nd, Pellegrin called me from Geneva with an invitation to accompany him to Namibia, where he would photograph the desert for his upcoming show. As with every project, he was filled with anticipation and doubt. “Yes, of course it’s about landscapes and nature, but I have to transform it,” he said. “It has to become something else, or else it doesn’t really work for what I’m trying to do or say. You have to, in a sense, go beyond—especially when it’s very beautiful.” He cautioned that he might be in a foul mood until he solved this problem. “I’m really not going there to take pretty pictures,” he insisted. “I’m looking for, well—I don’t know what, exactly.” He paused and exhaled slowly, and then the idea arrived. “I’m searching for the sublime.”
Pellegrin and I took off from Frankfurt and landed to the force of the Namibian desert sun. It was peak summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and we were speeding toward the Kalahari. Anthony rolled down the windows. There was no air-conditioning; in place of amenities, we had a reinforced floor, a spare fuel tank, and off-road suspension and tires. Road signs warned of crossing antelope and warthogs.
Anthony grew up in Damaraland, a rocky desert area in the northern part of the country, and greeted Pellegrin with a “Buongiorno” at the airport. He had started learning Italian in 2019, just before the pandemic hit and tourism revenue evaporated. Since then, he had absorbed what he could by streaming Italian television series. His wife was pregnant, he said, and he intended to name his son Gennaro, for the brash teen-age mobster in “Gomorrah.”
After a couple of hours of driving, we reached a point where the horizon was capped by the red sands of the Kalahari. We stopped at a lodge. There were animal hides for sale inside, and the entrance was flanked by small wooden statues of indigenous bushmen in loincloths, holding bows and arrows—a jarring sight in any context, amplified by the fact that there were a couple of local bushmen on staff. In the courtyard, an old man in a blue polo and a rumpled bathing suit was trying to coax a captive kudu—a species of large antelope, with corkscrew horns—into standing with him for a selfie.
Pellegrin sat down at the bar, and ordered a springbok sandwich. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he said. A few feet from our table, there was another captive antelope, an oryx; the lodge had fitted PVC piping over its horns, lest it impale guests. An hour before sunset, we set off with a local guide into the Kalahari dunes, stained red by iron oxide. The dunes begin in South Africa and extend beyond the Okavango Delta, in Botswana, he explained—but the patterns of the dunes hardly change. There were weavers and their nests, a few dozen wildebeests, four distant giraffes. I spotted a white rhinoceros, and the guide noted that it was a nine-year-old male. How did he know? The lodge had bought the rhino; an employee told me that the animals go for about thirty thousand dollars each. The tour ended atop a shallow dune, where lodge staff had set up a plastic table with a white tablecloth, gin, tonic, ice, and white wine, to toast the sunset.
Pellegrin grabbed a water. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he said again. The smoothness of travelling as a tourist seemed irreconcilable with the state of exertion and extremity that Pellegrin thought of as inherent to the creation of good work. There were all the conditions for viewing Namibian wildlife, but none for a submission to the elements which would leave him in a state of aesthetic contemplation.
That night, when we were alone in our cabins, the wind howled through the ancient red dunes. Primal, forceful, terrifying—it whipped sand against the walls and the windows. At breakfast, Pellegrin noted that to the wind it didn’t matter the name of the country we were in, the shape of the land, the borders. It was the indifferent form: wind the archetype, expressed in a specific instance—that wind on that night in the Kalahari. “Photography strives to be the opposite—to evoke the archetype through a specific instance,” he said.
He showed me an image that he had taken during our sunset safari drive: a blue wildebeest, caught in motion. The photograph was blurred in such a way as to obscure any particular qualities of this wildebeest, and in that way it elevated the image to the abstract: wildebeest the species, wildebeest the idea. The image evoked the cave paintings of Lascaux, drawn by hunter-gatherers some seventeen thousand years ago. How had I not seen this distilled form, too? I’d been with him the whole time, chasing after the galloping herd.
Pellegrin was born in Rome, into a family of architects. His father, Luigi, was an internationally renowned designer of public buildings and schools, and his mother, Luciana Menozzi, was an architect and a professor who came from a family of faded aristocrats. The Pellegrin home was filled with art and poetry, classic works from the humanities, and artisanal tools—aprons, brushes, pencils, sketchpads, rulers, inks, cameras, paints. “There was this family imperative that you had to express yourself, either in the humanities or the arts,” Pellegrin told me. “And there was this absolute disdain for anything that was related to office work—that would have been, you know, just unforgivable.” His mother’s family motto was Etiam si ali omnes, ego non—“Even if all others, not I.”
Pellegrin’s parents separated when he was little. He and his younger sister, Chiara, lived mostly with their mother, and Luigi treated his time with the children as an opportunity to impart his aesthetic world view. “He would expose us to art and history of art, and his references in the humanities and in science,” Pellegrin told me. There were pilgrimages to the Met, the Louvre, and the Sagrada Familia, and to sites of great art and architecture all over Italy. “Borromini Sundays, Bernini Saturdays, the churches, Caravaggio,” Pellegrin recalled. “My father introduced me to Senghor, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott, and the things he was reading. He was very much a Renaissance man, with a wide range of interests. And I think he felt that there’s a duty—his parental duty—to transmit these things to us, which ultimately formed an ethical system.” Through artistic expression, Luigi instructed his children, “you have to pay for the oxygen you breathe.”
Chiara announced her intention to become a painter when she was thirteen years old, and today she teaches art in Rome. “I, on the other hand, didn’t know what to do with myself,” Pellegrin told me. “I was schiacciato”—flattened—“by this totemic father figure. I had not found my vocation. So I was kind of failing in expressing myself, failing in this absolute imperative for every person. It didn’t descend upon me, like it did for Chiara. I was trying things—art, drawing, graphic design—and I was studying chess. I did a few tournaments. But, simply, I didn’t know what the fuck to do with myself.” When he turned nineteen, he enrolled in architectural studies at l’Università la Sapienza, in Rome. “I never knew how much I was trying to please my architect parents, or if it was the easy thing—a placeholder while I figured it out,” he said. His notebooks from that period show meticulous sketches of Baroque arches. But, after three years, “it just became clear to me that it wasn’t my calling,” he said. “There was something wrong. It didn’t coincide.”
One day, when Pellegrin was twenty-two, he walked into his father’s studio, “where my father was worshipped as a semi-divinity by his people,” he recalled. Luigi lit a cigarette and sat in silence with his feet on his desk, as Pellegrin announced that he was terminating his architectural studies. “It was very painful for me, but, at the same time, absolutely liberating,” he recalled. “The only certainty I had in this monologue was that at one point I realized that I could not get away with it without suggesting an alternative”—photography.
Luigi received the news, but said nothing. “It gave me an ulterior motive—to push myself even harder, to substantiate this decision,” Pellegrin said. He enrolled at a photography school in Rome. “And in a matter of a few months it became absolutely crystal clear to me that this was it,” he said. “I just knew. And, once you know, then everything else feels like a waste of time.”
In 2019, Pellegrin joined me in documenting an expedition to send a manned submersible to the deepest point in each ocean. While at sea, he read Alfred Lansing’s book “Endurance,” about the Shackleton expedition. I noticed that he often crouched down to take pictures, but it was only after he had finished the assignment that he told me why. He was shooting in a square format, black-and-white, from chest level, with tight framing and a shallow depth of field. The idea, he explained, was to evoke the documentary style and the equipment of expedition photographers from a hundred years earlier.
“There’s this Robert Capa quote—‘If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,’ ” he told me. “Very true! It always comes back to reducing or annulling distance. But that is only part of the equation. The other part is that if you’re not good enough, then you’re not reading enough. And the idea there is that photography is not actually about taking pictures—taking pictures is incidental. It’s a by-product, in a sense, of everything else. What you’re really doing is giving form—photographic form—to a thought, to an opinion, to an understanding of the world, of what is in front of you. And so if we think in these terms, then you have to improve the quality of your thoughts.”
The photography school in Rome taught the craft almost as one might teach carpentry—here are the tools, here’s how to work with different materials, various iterations of film and light. “O.K., I learned the artisanal aspect, the métier,” Pellegrin recalled. “But in terms of the language—that, no one really taught. Photography is a foreign language, and I had to master this thing. I had to learn how to speak.”
Every day he went out shooting, and every night he went back to the studio to develop film and make prints. He read essays on photography by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, and noted the ways in which great authors and poets observed and refracted the world in front of them. Rilke’s eighth elegy focusses on the gaze of animals; Derrida feels ashamed when his cat sees him naked. Pellegrin worked various odd jobs, and spent much of the proceeds on photography books: “Telex Iran,” by Gilles Peress; “Gypsies,“ by Josef Koudelka. “One of the great lessons was to look at Koudelka’s contact sheets, because he would go back to the same place and essentially take the same picture, again and again, day after day,” he said. “And I completely understand that. That idea of looking for the exact position—that is the puzzle.
“I was trying to find my own voice in this,” Pellegrin recalled. “For those initial years—for many years, in fact—I put myself through this, because it was absolutely necessary, in my mind, to re-create la bottega, the Renaissance workshop. You go in and you mix the colors for six months. Then for another six months you prepare the canvas. Et cetera, et cetera.”
For five years, Pellegrin studied and practiced on the streets of Rome. He was drawn to the fringes and the forgotten, the lives of drifters, circus performers, Roma families, and the city’s unhoused. After a well-paid gig as a set photographer for a film, he bought an old Mercedes, loaded it with his books and his photo gear, and set off for Paris. He had few friends there, no contacts, no meetings—just the addresses of two photo agencies. It was 1991. Pellegrin, who was twenty-seven, dropped off an envelope of pictures at Agence Vu, and was accepted by the agency by the end of the week.
The rest of Pellegrin’s apprenticeship took place in the field—Uganda, Bosnia, Gaza, Cambodia, Haiti. “It was done by doing,” he said, mostly in scenes of conflict, epidemic, and natural disaster. He became obsessed with the ways in which a photograph can shape and be shaped by history, as well as by the ethical and aesthetic relationships between an individual subject and the larger human condition. Often, he would make repeated or extended visits, drawing out projects over the span of years. “We have, as photojournalists, the ultimate desire of invisibility—to be able to shoot without being noticed, without the subject looking into your eyes,” he said. “But you achieve that through presence—not surreptitiously, not on the go, but by being there. By being there, you become part of it. And by becoming part of it you become invisible.”
In 1999, he went to Kosovo. It was his first time working in an active-shooting war, and he stayed in the region for much of the next two years. Here the theoretical and the technical coincided with the real. Displaced Kosovar Serbs, marching in snow, appear as spectres through foggy glass; an Albanian refugee couple in a car look lost in anguish, as their windshield reflects the shadows of people grasping at a barbed-wire fence; the death of a Serbian man, murdered by Albanians, is shown not with his body but in the faces of the women who mourn what we understand to be the corpse laid out in front of them. “In photography, we have our little rectangle, through which we see the world,” Pellegrin said. “But then sometimes you can go beyond it,” suggesting a larger truth or horror by excluding the main event.
“Kosovo was my shadow line,” he told me, referring to a Joseph Conrad novel about a young man who learns to become a ship’s captain by enduring a series of crises at sea. “All the training, all the time, the effort, the doubt—it just came together. Now I was fully a photographer,” he said. “But I’m a different photographer today than I was ten years ago, or twenty years ago. Everything informs and becomes vision.”
One afternoon, Pellegrin was driving through Bosnia when he felt suddenly blinded by the force of the sun. “I couldn’t understand what the fuck was happening to me,” he said—he knew only that he was experiencing an abnormal sensitivity to light. “Later, when I went back to Rome, I had my eyes checked. And the indicators were there”: an aggressive case of glaucoma. He was in his early thirties.
Glaucoma is one of the most common causes of blindness for people older than sixty, but it is rare in young people, and the factors that trigger it remain poorly understood. Pressure inside the eyes gradually erodes the optic nerve, creating blind spots—sometimes imperceptibly, at first. Often, people don’t know that they have the condition until their peripheral vision is gone. Then the blackness moves inward; its march can sometimes be halted, with treatment and surgeries, but an optic nerve—unlike a cornea or the heart or a femur—is irreplaceable. No area of vision that is lost to glaucoma can be restored.
For Pellegrin, the onset of glaucoma coincided with the end of his photographic bottega and the beginning of his “doing the work as a kind of artisan—as it ought to be done.” The visual effect was mild, at first, the psychological effect less so. Glaucoma filled him with “a rage to see,” as he put it. “To see more, to see beyond—to see at the maximum.”
In 1999, while Pellegrin was in Kosovo, he was invited by the photographers Susan Meiselas and Alex Webb to apply to the Magnum Photos agency, the pinnacle of photojournalism. But he declined, mostly out of deference to his agents at the time. His father, for his part, was suspicious of Magnum’s prestige. “This is a cult,” Luigi advised. Any such affiliation would be “inward looking, and your work should be expansive.”
The next year, Meiselas and Webb extended another invitation. Pellegrin printed a portfolio, and went to the airport in Rome to catch a flight to London, where the agency was holding its annual meeting. But, when his flight started boarding, he didn’t get up. Then the gate agent called his name over the intercom. He stood, and walked out of the airport.
By now, Luigi Pellegrin was seventy-five, and had smoked a couple of packs of Marlboros every day of Paolo’s life. The Kosovo work moved him, deeply—he had seen his son succeed in self-expression, in creating meaningful work that would have an effect on the community. Shortly before he died, he invited Paolo to do an exhibit with him—his designs for construction, Paolo’s images of destruction—and the show was launched in Rome. Soon afterward, Magnum invited Paolo to apply a third time, and, finally, he joined.
From that point forward, Pellegrin recalled, “I was gone for the world—I was just out there, three hundred days a year.” Algeria, Mexico, Syria, Guantánamo, Kuwait. He was detained by Hamas in Gaza, shot at by Israeli troops in the West Bank, beaten up by Turkish police, and wounded by Israeli shelling in southern Lebanon. Through his lens—and through images often printed in Newsweek and the Times Magazine—viewers saw Yasir Arafat, Muammar Qaddafi, Kate Winslet, the body of the Pope.
“Most of Pellegrin’s images are gritty and sooty, closer to charcoal sketches than properly taken pictures,” Kathy Ryan, the director of photography at the Times Magazine, wrote, in the prologue to one of Pellegrin’s books. “They vibrate with anguish, fear, suffering; they are at the end of their tether, in mourning. Pellegrin long ago gave up the tools of the coolly detached documentarist, abandoning the clear and sharp in favor of this palette of light and shade.”
Pellegrin never crops his photographs; what he frames in the viewfinder is what appears on the page. But outside the frame, in his travels, there have been many surreal moments. During the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003, he was driving through the desert with another photographer when a group of Iraqi deserters surrendered to them. Another time, he was trekking through a remote jungle in the Republic of the Congo with a local anthropologist in search of what they believed to be a tribe that had had almost no contact with the outside world; suddenly, a group of children ran toward them, shouting greetings in Mandarin. Later, Pellegrin and the reporter Scott Anderson, a longtime collaborator of his, spent several days in Siberia with two hulking Russian brothers, neither of whom spoke English. One night, after lighting a campfire, one of the Russians procured a short-wave radio. “Louis Armstrong,” he noted, as “What a Wonderful World” rattled through the tiny speaker. “Yes, yes!” Pellegrin said. It was their first cultural touchpoint, the first moment of icebreaking camaraderie—and it was destroyed the next second, when the other Russian grunted the N-word.
Sufis in Cairo, extremists in Kenya, the tsunami in Indonesia, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima—home was wherever his girlfriend lived, Pellegrin supposed. When he was in his forties, he met and married the photographer Kathryn Cook, and they had two daughters, Luna and Emma. Still, Pellegrin was always on the road. Often, he would exert himself so completely on assignments that as soon as the project was over he collapsed, in sickness and exhaustion—even to the point of hospitalization. “I was never really able to pace myself—to measure the effort, and to calibrate it,” he told me. “If one’s objective is the maximum, one has to give the maximum.
“My first four years of Magnum, I was unstoppable,” he continued. “But so was he—this darkness on the periphery.” The glaucoma’s progression mirrored his own, and he was too negligent or busy to address it. He used to shoot with his left eye, but as it deteriorated he trained himself to shoot with his right. Expensive surgeries and medicated eyedrops reduced the pressure on his optic nerve, but every headache left him wondering if his eyesight would be worse when it lifted. His greatest fear, while working in conflict zones, was not the bullets or the bombs—it was the drawn-out hell of running out of eyedrops if he was abducted or thrown in jail.
“For twenty-five years, this Sword of Damocles has been hanging over me, and I have had to treat each project as if it is my last,” Pellegrin told me. But the blindness never actually materialized—the progression has slowed, and possibly halted, and to the extent that his field of view has narrowed it does not harm his work. If anything, he said, he has come to see glaucoma as an ally, a kind of secret weapon—“albeit a very tortured one.” It imbued his work with “a kind of finality,” he said. “It gave an urgency to everything I do.”
Today, Pellegrin speaks of blindness as a kind of spectral presence in his mind—not because it is imminent but because for nearly as long as he has been a professional photographer he has been grappling with the implications of what it would mean if it were. He found inspiration in a passage about a group of devoted calligraphers in Orhan Pamuk’s novel “My Name Is Red.” “They would copy the Quran with beautiful, meticulous handwriting, all of their lives,” he told me. “And to go blind, at the end of their lives, was seen as the completion of their opus, their life’s work. They had spent all of themselves and all of their vision.” He added, “They gave their eyes to God.”
The physical world is composed of mathematical constants, one of which is that the dunes of the Namib Desert collapse beyond a gradient of thirty-four degrees. Pellegrin and I were walking in the sand, at least fifty miles from the nearest village or town. To the north and the east, the dunes extended for dozens of miles; to the south, hundreds; to the west, they tumbled into the Atlantic Ocean, perpetually changing—and being changed by—the waves and the currents. I had brought sunscreen from Europe, but when I offered it to Pellegrin, on the morning of our arrival, he told me that he prefers “the old method, of just being a man”—and so now, having deferred to my friend’s better judgment, we were both suffering, our cheekbones raging and tender. Two days would pass before we reached a pharmacy where we could buy aloe vera, like men.
There was a boundless horizon—no animals, no plants, no sounds but the wind and the friction of sand in motion. “It’s so devoid of everything—it’s so severe that it doesn’t allow any distraction,” Pellegrin noted. “You’re just faced with it—and yourself in it.
“Guarda l’eleganza e la perfezione del disegno, delle forme,” Pellegrin said—“Look at the elegance and the perfection of the design, of the forms.” The slopes of the sand were in some places so smooth and evenly lit that you could not make out the shape of the curves. It was constantly changing, particle by tiny particle, and “yet it is always perfect,” Pellegrin said. Always a different shape, never a wrong one. The American poet A. R. Ammons observed in his book “Sphere,” from 1974, that “the shapes nearest shapelessness awe us most, suggest the god.”
The clouds shifted, and a mottled pattern of light and shadow drifted across the vast landscape. Something overcame Pellegrin. He went silent and lifted his camera, as expected, but in moments of intense concentration he looks like a different person. His eyes are still, his lips a little pursed. He moves deliberately, silently, his head scanning the scene—not smoothly but in sharp turns, like a raptor. My father is a concert pianist; I have always found it mesmerizing to observe someone who is among the best at something, doing it as it ought to be done.
For most of his career, Pellegrin sought to reflect the complexity of his subject matter in additive compositions, fitting into the frame “as many elements, as much world, as much life” as possible, he said. He admired the work of Gilles Peress, whose careful framing portrayed colliding scenes and contradictions—a collage in a single frame. “But now I find myself—let’s call it in the full maturity of my life—and I find myself doing the opposite, and that is that of subtraction,” Pellegrin told me. It wasn’t a conscious decision so much as “it just started happening, in my process, and then I became aware of it,” he said. “The thought arrives before the mind thinks it.”
In 2017, while flying with the NASA scientists over Antarctica, he was struggling to convey the enormous scale of the ice shelf, the glaciers, the mountains, and the sea. “Photography is ill-equipped to represent this,” he told me. So he decided to exclude from his frames the viewer’s only anchor: the horizon. “How do you render an experience of the sublime? You address the idea of infinity,” he said. “Now the macro can become the micro, and vice versa. Space becomes a mental state.”
In one of the most striking images, a mountain ridge appears as a scar in the snow, a mere slice in the white vastness. “I wanted to make a picture like a Fontana cut,” he said, referring to Lucio Fontana, the Argentine-Italian painter who in the nineteen-fifties began slashing his canvases. Fontana’s process required gruelling preparation; the outcome looked as if it had been done in one stroke. “They think it’s easy to make a cut or a hole,” Fontana once said. “But it’s not true. You have no idea how much stuff I throw away.”
“Why do most great pictures look uncontrived?” Robert Adams writes, in his essay “Beauty in Photography,” from 1981. “Why do photographers bother with the deception, especially since it so often requires the hardest work of all? The answer is, I think, that the deception is necessary if the goal of art is to be reached: only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that Beauty is commonplace.” Form is beautiful, he notes, because “it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and therefore our suffering is without meaning.”
On our way out of the dunes, we entered into controlled falls, with the sand tumbling upon itself, past the thirty-four-degree angle. Then we reached the Atlantic and drove along the beach. At times, the margin between dune and water was narrower than the truck, and the ocean lapped at the tires, threatening to pull us in. There was a whale corpse, several shipwrecks, thousands of rotting seals. We must have seen seals in every stage of decay, from bloated to burst, furry and with faces to skeletons picked clean. Some were unavoidable; the sand cleaned flesh out of the tires and the smell didn’t linger. “These are not traces or symbols of death,” Pellegrin said. “This is just death.”
“Last month was the mating season,” our guide explained. “The males fight, and try to get a tooth through their rival’s skull, and the loser just dies right there.” Eight months later, the killers’ offspring are born. Pellegrin photographed the whale and the shipwrecks, and some jackals scavenging the seals. “One thing my dad told me is that he would rather be killed than kill,” he said. “That thought stayed with me for a long time. For him it was unthinkable, the act of killing.” But Luigi Pellegrin, unlike his son, was never shot at or shelled. “I don’t know that I agree,” Paolo told me.
We set off north, through Namibia’s desolate Skeleton Coast. More than a thousand shipwrecks litter these sands, from as far back as 1530. Local bushmen refer to this vast patch of desert and fog and surf as “the land God made in anger”; to Portuguese mariners it was “the Gates of Hell.” Abandoned whaling stations rust in the sun, and jackals tread carefully amid the ruins of metal and shattered glass. Some bottles are still corked, with rancid booze.
We stopped a few times to photograph wrecks and to walk in the sand. “There are certain places that trigger the imagination, that just transcend time,” Pellegrin observed. The waves rolled in, as they always have. “You could imagine this five hundred years ago or five million years ago,” he said.
The next morning, we walked into a seal colony, at Cape Cross. Heaving, shrieking, growling, crying, shitting, croaking, dying. Only the sounds exceeded the stench in absurdity. The animals flopped about with no decipherable intent or purpose—some screaming out as if in existential pain, others rolling indifferently among their own rotting dead. Pellegrin snapped a double exposure—two overlapping frames, a half second apart—to reflect the chaos. The only seals that seemed untroubled by their own existence were those which had already expired.
Pellegrin did not expect to encounter the sublime in a visit to the seal colony; his interest in wild animals derived, instead, from a scene in a novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. In “Broken April,” from 1978, a young man in a mountain village is caught up in a blood feud. Forced to commit a murder, to avenge his brother’s death, he is now next in line to be killed by the opposing family. Before the “blood tax” is paid, however, he encounters a high-class woman passing by in a carriage, and for a moment their eyes are locked in gaze.
“He falls in love during this brief exchange of the gaze,” Pellegrin said. “He is going to his death, but he has touched the pinnacle.” Now, in encounters with wild animals, Pellegrin sought to capture “that micro-instance,” in which we are looking at nature but are also looked upon by it. A landscape may be charged with symbolic or even literal magnetic properties, he said. “But it does not look at us. And the animal does.
“From an animal’s perspective, we are much more unpredictable than they are for us,” he continued. “We could shoot them, or we could pet them—we’re completely random. But there’s something around the idea of the gaze. In that exchange there is a fear, which we both have.”
Anthony drove us to Damaraland, his homeland. Walking among the red rock mountains, we encountered a hulking male rhinoceros. The animal was in the valley; we were trekking carefully downwind, so that it couldn’t smell us. When we were about ninety metres away, Pellegrin raised his camera. The rhino harrumphed, stared back, and pawed at the ground—but didn’t charge. We stood still; we’d been told that rhinos have poor eyesight. “Come to think of it, this really is about the encounter between two shortsighted animals,” Pellegrin whispered.
“Photographically, it’s not really working,” he continued. “We’re too far. But the experience is extraordinary, this point of contact with pure wilderness.” To surrender to the circumstances was no different, in a sense, from walking atop a glacier; a sudden change in the direction of the wind could bring about the end. “It’s like looking inside an abyss,” Pellegrin said. “And he is looking right back at us.”
In photography, light is perhaps the only absolute requirement: photons hit the film or the sensor for as long as it is exposed, and that is what makes the picture. A photograph memorializes not only the light shown in that instance but its effects, and all that it has affected, through all time.
Most photographs are taken with the shutter open for less than a hundredth of a second, and in that way a single, cumulative second of light against a photographer’s film or sensor might make up his hundred greatest works. A measure of a lifetime, all in one second.
It was five in the morning in the Deadvlei Pan, and, among the ancient, long-dead trees, Pellegrin was playing with the absence of light. Even with a thirty-second exposure, his camera, affixed to a tripod, did not encounter enough photons to render an image.
He took out a flashlight and used it to paint the trees with the shutter open—sometimes from the side, sometimes from behind. The effect was ghostly and beautiful, but he felt that it was too unnatural, too contrived. Capturing the magic of the Deadvlei Pan shouldn’t be an exercise in technique, he said. He had come to capture sublimity as it is.
At five-twenty-four, the fog was suddenly perceptible against the black dunes. Sunrise wouldn’t come for almost an hour, but something had shifted. Pellegrin switched off his headlamp and his flashlight, and gasped. The trees appeared as a subtraction, reflecting their own death as a black void against a less black sky. It was still too dark to see color. But suddenly he could see. ♦
