TITLE: Imprints

Imprints traces the silent conversations between wind and sand. Each photograph lingers on temporary textures — folds, cascades, ridges — forms that dissolve almost as quickly as they appear. The desert here is not distant but intimate. It becomes fabric, skin, even breath: velvet, silk, meringue, woven by air. These metaphors transform the landscape into a sensory map of silence — a reminder that absence, too, leaves a presence.

By drawing close to the dunes, the series shifts away from the desert’s vastness and into its fragile details. Light folds into cloth, grains slip like water, ridges rise like vertebrae under skin. Each surface carries a tension between permanence and impermanence, presence and memory.

Working in black and white, I strip the image to essentials so texture and light can speak. Without color, what remains is surface, shadow, and line — the language of touch. The desert reveals itself as a place of transformation: sand cascading like water, ridges as a spine, traces lingering like fingers across skin.

The titles echo this tactile approach: Velvet Edge as threshold, Meringue Peaks as fragility, The Silken Drape as fabric, Eternal Sandglass as time, Tranquil Spine as structure, Traces as memory, and Aeolian Weave as unity. Imprints is not about permanence but the beauty of what cannot be held — what disappears, yet is never lost. In every fold of sand, silence leaves its presence.

AUTHOR: Kristina Ishutina (United Arab Emirates)

My name is Kristina Ishutina. I am a self-taught photographer living in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Art has always been present in my life, but it was through motherhood that I truly began to look at photography as more than a record of moments. When my daughter was born, I wanted to capture the small, fragile details of our time together — not only how they appeared, but how they felt: the warmth of her hand, the joy in her laughter, the fleeting beauty of everyday life. She remains my greatest inspiration, and the only one who knows I am submitting this work. Living with ADHD, I often experience the world through heightened textures and sensations. Photography became a way to translate that intensity into something visible — to hold onto the fleeting touch of wind, the coolness of water, the fragrance of flowers, the memory of skin, or the silence of the desert. Over time, I have grown to see photography as a form of listening. Each image is not only about what stands before the lens, but about what lingers beneath it — presence, memory, impermanence. Working primarily in black and white, I explore how absence can reveal presence.