Pancho Saula Spanish, b. 3/10/1972

The bottom two thirds of the square is a dune. It comes up out of the frame in one long pale swell, ribbed all over with wind marks, and it is so bright that it reads as snow. Above it lies a settlement: thirty-odd huts of timber and thatch strung along the flat, dark against the sand. Above that, a horizon of low ridges. And above everything, a sky like a slab of slate. The tones have been turned over. The ground gives off light and the sky withholds it.

The people are very small and there are a great many of them. A line of figures crosses the open sand at the left, walking in single file. A knot of children stands about in the middle distance. Off to the right, by the last huts, more of them, and a frame of poles where something is being built. None of them is doing anything remarkable. They are going somewhere, or standing near a door, which is what people mostly do.

A settlement photographed from this far off usually turns into a pattern, and this one nearly does. What stops it is the walking. The dune is enormous and slow and will still be arriving in a hundred years. The huts are made of sticks. The sky has gone black in the middle of the day. And across the middle of all that, at the pace of a person carrying something, a row of small dark marks is moving from one place to another. Saula photographed the least dramatic thing in the frame and gave it the whole picture to cross.