Giulio Aprin is a photographer and digital artist working online under the ENS handle saharaman.eth, whose photographs and NFTs document remote deserts and other little-seen landscapes across North Africa and the Middle East.,Aprin captures many of these sites by drone as well as handheld camera, and turned to blockchain technology in 2021 to sell, authenticate and permanently record the geographic data behind his images.
Aprin picked up a camera at the age of five and by his teenage years was documenting Rome's 2011 Indignados protests, an experience that shaped his commitment to documenting places, events and people.He went on to study documentary filmmaking in London,then spent about five years travelling to desert regions such as the Wadi Rum, Namib and Sahara deserts, from the Gulf countries to Jordan and from Namibia to Mauritania, before discovering blockchain technology and NFTs in late 2021.He is the founder and writer of Wild Man Life, a travel website documenting remote destinations and desert expeditions through photography and long-form writing.,
On SuperRare, released through TransientLabs,his six-image series Ain Eddban documents a remote pair of salt-lake sinkholes on the Libya-Tunisia border, formed by a collapsing dolina and fed by a deep artesian spring.,A separate series, Erg Titersin, and individual works such as Wadi Al Shatii, extend the same practice of documenting remote Saharan geography as collectible photographs.Aprin also curated “NFT Photography Spotlight” for NFT Culture, a showcase pairing his own work with other NFT photographers including Dominika Cuda, Ray Vázquez and George Benjamin.
