Jeanloup Sieff
"Death Valley"

"It will soon be twenty years since Barbara and I set off for a few weeks walkabout in Death Valley. Situated in the Mojave Desert, partly in California and partly in Nevada, this valleywas so named because hundreds of settlers died of thirst there in their quest for life-saving West back in 1849.

The initial reason behind this trip was a book and a television program; the deeper reason was a need to clear our heads. We never once thought the motionless time we experienced there would be found again twenty years later through these pictures which had been forgotten in a drawer, and these ewtract from my diary of the time.

Two years ago at Christmas we returned for a short one-week trip with our children. It was there that my daughter Sonia and son Sacha took their first photographs, thereby taking over the torch of our own memories."

Jeanloup Sieff, november 1997.