John Randolph Pepper, internationally renowned photographer, exhibits regularly around the world --United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Russia. Pepper who works only in B&W (with no post production or Photoshop) shoots with a Leica M6, 35mm lens, Ilford HP5 film and prints only on Baryte paper with silver gelatin. INHABITED DESERTS (Pepper’s fourth book), the result of a 3 year and 18,000km journey, offers a unique and poetic vision of disparate deserts throughout different continents; Pepper writes: “Through my camera I attempt. I do not seek the image, it is the image that finds me. My aim is to find the symbiosis between the landscape that is before me and the image that is within me –such as painter with a virgin canvas or a writer with a blank piece of paper.” Critic and curator Kirill Petrin states in his essay “John Pepper's photographs rediscover deserts, and, while going with him on this adventure, you may discover a thing or two about yourself. Even some of his legendary desert guides, men who spend their lives in the desert and know its every nook and cranny, admit they haven’t seen their own deserts like this before. Pepper's photographs, paradoxically, don’t take you to the actual places where they are shot. They take you elsewhere, to a new place for your mind and imagination to inhabit…” In his seminal analysis, curator Gianluca Marziani adds: “John R. Pepper has understood how to shoot the deserts, their metaphorical energy, the matter below the surface…His black and white is rich with archaic tongues, engravings on the rock, parables and tales. It is filled with archetypes and legends, men and women, animals and plants, packed with cruelty and beauty, solitude and encounters, extreme sentiments and single little stories ... in those prints we don't see human presences but we perceive the passage of millennia…” This beautifully produced book includes 58 photographs as well as back stage section that illustrates Pepper’s journey and work