It was on a trip with her family in 2004 that Emma Livingston discovered the landscape of the NOA — the Noroeste Argentino, or north-west region of Argentina. She realized then that she would have to go back to photograph it. Her perceptive eye, trained in disciplined European and Pampa landscapes, found in this dry, rugged region, open to the wind and to both high and low temperatures daily, a kindred subject. The texture and unexpected shading of the soil and hills, the isolated tussles of weeds, and a few animals lost in a wide open view, suggested to her how to proceed.

A direct shot of the hills within a square frame, avoiding the sky, brings out the pictorial qualities of the physical accidents. This format distracts the spectator from the notion of landscape and might delude him or her into reading it as an oneiric experience or an invention of the author. Eventually, an attentive and shrewd gaze will unveil a photograph of a specific region in a chosen format.

The Puna, also known as the Altiplano, where the Andes are at their widest, is the most extensive area of high plateau on earth outside of Tibet. It is an area of inland drainage very rich in minerals (copper, silver and gold amongst others), salt flats and volcanoes. Its climate is determined by the eastern mountain barriers that block the passing of the humid winds from the Atlantic Ocean. This causes dramatic differences of temperature in winter, when the sun is blazingly strong during the day, contrasting absolutely with the scarce rainfall — perhaps 100 mm per annum — and intensive frosts at night.

On successive trips, other impressions and concepts layered the artist’s first visual awareness of the region. What had started as a photographic pursuit, as an aesthetic investigation, veered into a much needed record of the here and now, of the day-to-day changes in an area that risks losing its desolate character. The minerals in the land attract man’s grasp and his footsteps. The marks of his footprints, because of the very scarce rain, last for years: there is only wind in the puna, changes on the surface of the land are few and extremely slow, says the author. Paradoxically, it is this very lack of water that gives the almost barren landscape its haunting appeal.

The attraction the artist feels for those arid landscapes, and for the poetic roughness of the grainy land, is now coupled by her concern for the area, the well-being of its people and the animal species that inhabit it.

This reality is at the very heart of a work of art. The artist, in her quest for beauty, reveals a vital conflict.