For the exhibition The Desert presented in 2000, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain asked a selection of international artists to visit deserts and produce a work that would reflect their vision of that terrain. The works executed for the occasion reveal the contradictions of the desert: a space of unity and contrast where the static contrasts with the perpetual movement of the dunes shifting in the wind. Threatened with obliteration and disappearance, the urgency of capturing the trace of the desert finds an answer in photography and drawings. This book gathers both previously published and specially produced new works by Lara Baldi, Balthasar Burkhard, Raymond Depardon, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Titouan Lamazou, Beat Streuli, and Andrei Ujica.