Roland Blum Liechtenstein, b. 1966

Since 2018, Blum has been working on his multi-award-winning international photography project “Poetry of Silence”, which sees him return time and again to the Namib Desert (from the Nama language “an area where there is nothing”) in Namibia.

Blum travels mainly in the remote northern part of the Namib. It is there that he creates the quiet poetry of his large-format photographs. On the Atlantic coast, which borders the desert to the west, the cold Benguela current of the Atlantic meets the barren land. Almost every morning, thick fog settles over the desert, caused by the rapid cooling of the sea air at night. In the helicopter, Blum flies directly along the edge of the fog with his telephoto lens and is repeatedly drawn deep into the breathtakingly archaic world of the Namib. But before he photographs these aerial shots, he takes a lot of time to build up a relationship with the landscape: he takes long walks at night and during the day to study the different light conditions and their effect on the landscape.
The results are silent verses in the form of visual poems - a tribute to this incredible and unique landscape.

In 2021, Blum won the New York Photography Silver Award.
In 2022, he was able to co-design the Namibia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with parts of this work.

In 2023, he won first prize in the “Abstract” category at the prestigious Monochrome Photography Awards. In the same year, his first book “Poetry of Silence” won the Silver Award at the Tokyo Photography Awards. The book was presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2023 and 2024.

Blum's photographs can be seen in various exhibitions. In Liechtenstein, Feldkirch, Zurich, Munich, Milan, Glasgow, Athens, Barcelona, Chopqing (China), among others.