JULIA BOHLE
This Place was a Desert
A place of haunting stillness and raw intensity—a vast, arid expanse where silence sharpens perception. In this landscape, solitude becomes confrontation; life and death blur at the edges. The heat clings even in winter.
This Place Was a Desert is part of my practice-led research project investigating the aura of the artist book and how desert landscapes can be translated into book form—both as physical object and emotional space. The work reflects on how arid environments—vast, silent, and often harsh—resonate with internal states of solitude, stillness, disconnection, and slow transformation.
The project emerged during a period of personal estrangement, when walking through remote desert spaces offered a kind of psychological mirror. These landscapes became symbolic terrain—empty yet charged, silent but overwhelming. One of the central locations for this work was Broken Hill, a remote mining town in New South Wales, Australia encountered as a threshold between human habitation and the vast, unyielding desert beyond. Its stark atmosphere—both historically weighted and physically exposed—shaped the emotional and visual tone of the project.
Through photography, writing, and handmade book processes, the work explores the tension and dialogue between outer landscape and inner experience. Visually and materially, it brings together analogue photography, collage, digital layering, and short, poetic texts. Most of the images were made in the Australian desert; others were constructed in the studio to evoke emotional memory or imagined space. The writing is drawn from field notes, paired with images.
