TSAUS MOUNTAIN

Abstraction of landscapes was what first drew me to aerial photography.

There is something almost surreal about how the landscape transforms from above. To me, it does not merely capture a scene – it reinterprets it. What painters once achieved with brush and oil, light, and color can now be discovered with new tools. Painters of landscapes often tried to get an elevated perspective on their subject to get an overview and context of the surroundings.

From an elevated perspective, the texture becomes tone, and scale dissolves. Lines carve through terrain. Colors, forms, and patterns arrange themselves into a kind of visual rhythm. Yet it's still ordinary that with a clear composition eventually becomes a picture.

Aerial photography, then, is not just documentation — it is interpretation. It invites us to see the world as it is and as it feels. In this way, the camera becomes both lens and brush, and the landscape, an enduring subject in the painterly tradition — surreal, abstract, and endlessly reimagined.

This series was taken in 2021 in Namibia’s Sperrgebiet National Park — one of the most abstract natural landscapes on Earth. It features the pancake-layered Tsaus Mountains and other mesmerising formations of one of the world’s oldest deserts.