Valley of the Moon

Source
essay by shana chandra As seen in photographer Chris Mann’s Artist Book

In Bedouin traditions, when a baby is born, the father hunts a scoropion then burns and crushes it, mixes it with olive oil and applies it to the child’s body out of the belief the treatment will protect the infant from scorpions during their life.

These photographs are the scropion for the desert. The image is catpured and swayed in chemoicals, then applied to her mind’s eye, out of the belief that the treatment will protect her from the wandering soles of humans throughout her life.

As talismans of her psychic realm, they rupture forth from the true place of our collective dreams but are just as ephemeral in their shape-shifting layers, holding all that is light and dark in the delicate folds of the burning afternoon sun.

Within the red seams of the earth, leaves bloom to the eternal secrets the dust holds buried. Ears blister in her rock, hanted by the shadown of a sandalled man. The shadow will be gone, but the sand will stay, until it too shifts, across the desert’s spine.

Tags: Art Book