Published by NHP Publishing in 2019, Chiara Zonca’s Desert Portraits brings together photographs made in Chile’s Atacama Desert and across the Bolivian Altiplano. Its subtitle, Tales from the Altiplano, places the work within a particular South American geography, while the main title suggests how Zonca regards the landscape: not as an anonymous backdrop, but as a subject with its own presence and character.

Warm, pastel tones temper terrain that is physically severe. These high-elevation regions are defined by aridity, scarce water and limited plant and animal life, yet Zonca does not treat them simply as records of environmental extremity. Open space, dramatic formations and near-emptiness become the foundations of a photographic language concerned with immersion. The images draw out an atmosphere at once ancient and surreal, allowing desolation and visual richness to remain in productive tension.

The distinctive quality of the work lies in this balance between geographic specificity and imaginative interpretation. Zonca’s connection to dramatic terrain informs photographs that register freedom and expansiveness without disguising the conditions that produce them. Her restrained palette further separates the project from a conventionally spectacular account of desert scenery: scale is present, but so are quiet tonal transitions and the psychological charge of isolation.

At 112 pages, this hardcover volume gives the project sufficient breadth to establish a sustained sense of place while retaining the concentration of a focused landscape study. For collectors interested in contemporary landscape photography, South American environments or the photobook as a means of shaping regional experience, Desert Portraits warrants attention for the coherence of its subject and visual vocabulary. It is a precisely situated body of work in which the Atacama and the Altiplano are neither scenery nor abstraction, but the central protagonists.