Badain Jaran: The Forgotten Desert

Badain Jaran is a desert, more than 19,000 square miles of endless openness, with innumerable sand dunes up to 1,600 feet tall and mysterious salt-water lakes. It is part of the Alashan desert, south-west to the Gobi in the Inner Mogolia province of China. A place that has been discovered by American scientists on satellite images in the 1980s only that miraculously has been kept hidden to most people since. In 2009-12 Carlos Crespo realised a vast photo essay on the unique, spectacular, and very remote landscape of Badain Jaran. Crespo had to deal with extreme cold in winter and violent sandstorms in spring and autumn in a barely inhabitable environment. Over time he made contact with some of the few Mongolian herdsmen living on the fringes of the desert and won their confidence and sympathy. This allowed him also to make portraits of these people and document their way of living. The new book Badain Jaran is meant to make this extraordinary place a symbol and metaphor for all untouched natural sites, reflecting their importance and the necessity of their protection from being turned into ever more tourist attractions.