I have had the privilege of traveling through many deserts around the world. The desert (from the Latin desertum, meaning solitude) is absolute, terrifying silence. The only place in the world where one can distinctly hear the beating of one's own heart. "The silence of the desert strips you bare. Through it, you become yourself; that is to say—nothing. But a nothingness that listens" (Edmond Jabès). "To speak of the desert is, first and foremost, to be silent, like it, and to pay homage to it not with our vain chatter, but with our silence" (Monod). For me, the desert is the most beautiful way to lose my sense of space and time, to rediscover the virtues of silence and contemplation.

There, I discovered places both harsh and magnificent, where primitive civilizations nestle, living in total harmony with their environment, in a complete economy of resources. They have nothing, they give everything.

Man cannot dominate the desert; he must remain humble: one feels very small there. The desert is a place that must be earned. The space is infinite, without barriers, without mercy. One cannot strive for performance or virtuosity. Time stops when one traverses the desert; one must lose time there. The harshness of nature and its immensity overwhelm man.

Paradoxically, a form of confinement takes hold: the desert, these expanses where reason is lost because it doesn't know where to escape. The sandy desert, the erg, is primal purity, the mystery of the wind that chases the dunes and gives them the purest lines. The erg is the pen of the grass that scratches the sand with cabalistic signs. A uniform harmony where only ghosts and wind seem to have passed.

The desert is absolute freedom, without limits, without barriers, the land of absolute detachment; the essence of Life. With each step on this ocean of dunes, we draw closer to self-knowledge, we learn to tame the infinite. Paradoxically, the imprint of our footsteps has already disappeared.

This series illustrates my fascination with the formal beauty of traces on the sand, from footprints to rivers and dunes. Everything there is fragile, ephemeral, like life itself. The sumptuous, vanishing dunes of the erg take on capricious shapes—the crescent, the straight line, the star, the dome, or the parabola—which demand uncompromising compositional work from the photographer. On a smaller scale, the scratches and cabalistic signs left by the wind or gravity, but also by humans, animals, or plants, fascinate me. Sand is a paradoxical material, at once fluid and solid, swirling and heavy, static and dynamic. The impressions recorded within it—imprints or undulating lines—take on a hieroglyphic appearance: visual reminders of the complex journeys that occur there. Sand is the trace of the journey.

For this series, I chose black and white out of respect for both the pure graphic quality of the dunes and the tracks in the sand, and for the profound blacks of the desert. I work with a digital camera with a fixed focal length and a wide-angle lens to immerse myself in the landscape or to highlight a foreground, without a tripod, to gain spontaneity, and also with a drone in a vertical position to explore a third dimension.