Marco Serventi Photography — Elsewhere

Artist statement

In the Australian Outback, you can drive for hours without seeing anything but red dirt, low bushes, and the occasional emu. But if you slow down enough, 300 km east of the frontier town of Broken Hill, you might notice a place like no other. At first glance, White Cliffs appears as a sea of small dirt hills, remnants of abandoned mineshafts dug over a century ago during the opal mining boom. Yet beneath this very surface lies an underground community of approximately 200 people. In White Cliffs, people live in subterranean homes, to shield themselves from the extreme desert temperatures. The series Elsewhere uncovers the hidden lives of those who have stepped out of conventional paths to forge their own way in one of the most remote corners of the Australian continent.