Driving through Podor, a small town in Senegal close to the border with Mauritania, something caught the eye of photographer Nicholas Holt.
He asked his guide if they could pull over for a moment and stepped out of the 4x4 into sweltering 40°C sweltering heat. Holt was in the country working on his The Photographic Angle/RPS Environmental Bursary project, Vert. It follows efforts led by SOS Sahel, an NGO, to create a 10-mile-wide, 4,350-mile-long stretch of forest, vegetation and fertile ground on the border of the Sahara Desert to combat desertification in the region.
As Holt moved closer, he realised he was looking at a tree that had been carefully wrapped in netting so it appeared as though it was veiled. “It was quite surreal,” he recalls. “The locals build these makeshift structures out of hessian, bricks, whatever they have available, to protect these young trees from the sun.”
Observing the way these oddly packaged trees lined the streets, Holt decided to make a series of images, almost taking a portraiture type approach.
“I thought it was interesting to just do the same photograph over and over again, like a typology,” he says. “If you look closely you can see the trees are covered but the material allows just enough light through to keep them alive. It’s clever.”
There is something disturbing in seeing the extraordinary efforts made to protect plants from the effects of climate change, but there is something beautiful too in the care behind this simple act of stewardship. It’s an alternative vision of how we might relate to the natural world – one that could lead us away from extraction towards restoration and conservation.
All images from the series Veiled Plants by Nicholas Holt.
See more work by TPA/RPS Environmental Bursary Nicolas Holt in the October-December 2024 issue of the RPS Journal.
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