White Man in a Hole

In the heart of the South Australian outback, along the desolate Stuart Highway, lies Coober Pedy the surreal “opal capital of the world,” and the subject of an extraordinary forthcoming book by acclaimed visual artist Tim Georgeson. Named from an Aboriginal phrase meaning “White Man in a Hole,” it is a place of survival and descent, where lives are carved underground against desert extremes.

Georgesons lens captures this post-apocalyptic frontier with raw clarity and poetic restraint. His photographs shift between barren horizons, hand-dug dwellings, and fragments of human presence, revealing a town caught between utopia and desolation, fortune and isolation. In black and white and colour, the images move between repetition and subtle shift, mimicking the rhythm of life where time, space, and silence stretch to extremes.

This is less a portrait of people than of a condition of an existential frontier where survival, extraction and imagination collide.

Exhibition and book launch, Contact Photo Festival, Toronto 2026