New Zealand-based photographer and art director Jacob Howard travels with a curiosity for the unknown, turning unfamiliar landscapes into carefully composed studies of place. The images here come from three of his series, Atlas Obscure, The Land Between the Seas and The In-Between, shot while traveling through Morocco, Egypt and Jordan.
One building, a wall of open ground
Howard's compositions almost always isolate a single subject inside its surroundings. A two-story house painted pink and burgundy sits alone against a canyon wall in Morocco, its green door and stepped parapet the only detail for the eye to land on before the frame runs out into gravel and rock. A concrete watchtower gets the same treatment elsewhere in the series, standing by itself on flat scrubland with nothing around it to give it scale except the empty plain.
Negative space does most of the composing
Expanses of sky and barren terrain give each photograph generous areas of empty ground, so a single red or white volume can hold its own against a landscape many times its size. A tall red panel and a smaller white cube stand together in open desert like sculptures set down with no plinth, and a second red monolith appears elsewhere paired the same way with a plain white block. The emptiness is not a backdrop Howard is working around. It is the subject working alongside a small, deliberate object.
Muted earth tones, punctuated by one loud color
Most of the palette across these three series sits in sand, clay and weathered concrete. Against that register, Howard lets a single color take over a frame: a car sealed under a plum-colored cover against a sunlit wall, an olive-green bus parked alone beside an empty road, a red-and-white striped football goal standing on a dirt pitch with no players, no lines and no fence. The color never spreads across the whole image. It shows up once, in one object, and the landscape around it stays exactly as muted as it was.
Streets and towns get the same treatment as the desert
Not every photograph in these series is empty of people or architecture. A multi-story kasbah building with carved arches and street lamps out front, and a narrow street lined with pink and white shopfronts, both appear alongside the isolated-object studies, widening the project beyond pure minimalism into a broader record of the towns Howard passed through. The framing stays consistent even here: a wide, level shot that gives the subject room on every side.
Canyons cut the only lines through flat terrain
Where the built subjects sit still, the landscape itself sometimes supplies the composition. An aerial view down a red-rock gorge traces a thin road and a dry riverbed through folded stone, and a second canyon shot frames a single-lane road threading between sheer walls. Both photographs drop the isolated-object formula entirely and let the terrain's own structure carry the frame.
A second Moroccan house, this time abandoned mid-build
A grey concrete structure stands unfinished on a gravel plain, its window openings still bare of glass. It belongs to the same interest in liminal, in-between spaces that runs through all three series: buildings caught mid-construction or mid-collapse, existing in a state that is neither start nor finish. A stack of raw timber and packing crates nearby, and a carpet thrown over what turns out to be a wheelchair propped against a sunlit wall, extend that same interest in objects mid-transition, waiting for a next stage that hasn't arrived yet.
The Land Between the Seas moves the project to Jordan
Two images come from a separate series, The Land Between the Seas, shot around the Dead Sea in Jordan. An abandoned white mansion with an ornate facade stands alone on flat desert ground, its unfinished balconies staring out at nothing. Elsewhere, a squat orange building topped with a single minaret catches the low light of dusk, the kind of solitary structure that could belong to any of Howard's three projects if the caption didn't say otherwise.
The In-Between finds the same minimalism in daily life
A third series, The In-Between, trades empty landscapes for small human moments still shot with the same restraint. A cyclist pedals past a walled building marked with two no-entry signs, a stack of colorful plastic crates fills an arched doorway in a pink wall like a piece of folk art, and a woman in a red dress crosses in front of a plain rust-colored wall in the distance. The compositions are tighter and the subjects are closer, but the instinct to isolate one clear thing against a flat field of color hasn't changed.
Running through all three projects is an interest in transition and liminal spaces, the moments and places that sit somewhere between what was and what comes next. Rather than searching for specific subjects, Howard lets enigmatic structures and unexpected encounters emerge naturally through his travels. More of his work is on his Behance portfolio.
