Mirage and memory.

The mystical power of the desert inspires artists and photographers in a new exhibition at the Fondation Cartier.

Simultaneously hostile and fascinating, desert landscapes still exert a mystical hold over human consciousness as the last truly inhospitable places on earth. A new exhibition of photographs, videos and films at the Fondation Cartier in Paris presents a remarkably manifold vision of the historical relationship between the desert and man, nature and humanity. Le desert inventively juxtaposes nineteenth-century photographic prints by European and American adventurer photographers with a series of specially-commissioned projects by 10 contemporary artists who travelled to the Sahara and the arid lands and deserts of Namibia, Palestine, Australia and the American South-West.

Rejecting a rigidly chronological or geographical structure, the various works explore humankind's relationship with space and landscape and bear strangely moving witness to personal experiences of the desert. Examining the historical connection between the invention of photography and European discovery of the desert, the exhibition focuses on the representation of space and landscapes that are perpetually being transformed. Faced with the threat of change, erasure an disappearance, the need to capture traces inscribed on the desert finds particularly apposite expression: in the medium of photography, with its capacity for instant distillation and exposure. It also has metaphorical resonances; for instance, the Arabic expression for photography -- mirrors that remember' -- poetically encapsulates an essential aspect of the desert as a site of memory and reflection.

Nineteenth-century Europe was exposed to the desert through the experiences of the great travellers, scientists and research teams, assembled for geographical or archaeological forays. Their early photographs introduced images of the desert to the Western world, revealing the awesome intensity of space, light and landscape. John Beasley Greene, one of the most important photographers in Egypt during the 1850s, records historical monuments bathed in a delicate golden hue emerging from the horizon like magical shimmering apparitions. Greene's portrayals of inanimate subjects contrast with Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault's photographs of veiled women, their robes billowing sensuously in the desert winds.

A psychiatrist and photographer, Clerambault took nearly 4000 pictures of a single subject; the draped clothing of Moroccan women. Much more than simple portrayals of a human figure, these images are visual metaphors for the desert.

Contemporary visions are more geographically wideranging and include William Eggleston's desolate pictures of the American South-West, Balthasar Burkhard's ravishing black and white aerial studies of Namib sand dunes and Swiss artist Beat Streuli's hypnotic slide montage of a journey between Alice Springs and Uluru (Ayres Rock), recording the red, dead centre of Australia. Dreamlike and compelling, the exhibition embodies an extraordinary diversity of approaches that lyrically express the sublime potency of nature refined and reflected through human imagination.