Salinity

Darren Lewey

Darren Lewey took up photography in 1981 with a home darkroom and then subsequently attended art school, college and university to study photography and film. He’s a passionate photographic educator running workshops in Morocco and Spain. He currently manages his photographic life by having several projects active and has become a leading image maker for an obscure forest next to his house.

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Salt piles both white and brown, excavation by way of evaporation, the semi-arid desert located basins exposed to the prevailing northerly winds and summer heat. Salt production from the sketchers’ imagination, an environment extremely hostile to life revealing through the frame a kind of atavistic visual austerity.

Some 30 years ago I had read about Saharan Salt and the caravans transporting it up from Algeria and Mali into Morocco. Salt literally worth its weight in gold. I can't be sure whether I had read or imagined desert towns made entirely from blocks of salt. The notion of such a wild inhospitable place appealed as a place to write about. Many years later, I found myself much closer to the Saharan source of salt, living in Morocco.

The small pockets of Morocco’s salt production located on its western coastline had been on my radar for years but photographically it seemed too unstructured and harsh to make any images there.