Kolmanskop

Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the Namib in southern Namibia, less than 10 miles inland from the port town of Lüderitz. It was named after a transport driver named Johnny Coleman who, during a sand storm, abandoned his ox wagon on a small incline opposite the settlement. It was once a small but very rich mining village, it is now a popular tourist destination run by Namdeb, a joint firm owned by the Namibian government and De Beers.

Kolmanskop: A Window In Time
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Kolmanskop: A Window In Time

In the abandoned rooms of Kolmanskop, the Namib Desert has done what deserts do — it has moved inside. Sand has drifted through broken windows for decades, building dunes in the bedrooms and parlors of a diamond mining town that was abandoned in 1956, the sand finer than ordinary desert sand, blown from the coastal dunes nearby. In monochrome, the scene becomes a meditation on what light does when it enters a room no one lives in: the window frame becomes a picture within a picture, the sand below it a landscape in miniature. The exposure was a careful balance — the brilliant window and the deep interior shadow differing by many stops of light, the scene resolved in a single frame.