Africa is where I began. A land of dust and memory, where the oldest roads were carved by elephants. It sings in rhythms of stillness and awe—of fear, of freedom. To walk her soil is to come home to something ancient. You arrive as one. You leave carrying the wild in your bones.
DEANNA DESHEA
With a foundation in fine art, my work emerges at the intersection of wild instinct and visual poetry. Traveling solo across Africa as a female photographer, I don’t chase perfection—I seek presence. Each frame is a study in impermanence, in beauty that vanishes, in lives suspended between survival and silence.
I see animals not just as subjects, but as the original art forms of the wild—sculpted by evolution, drawn in shadow and sun. Their movements echo brushstrokes; their forms dissolve into texture, into tone. Light and dust become collaborators. Patience becomes a medium.
My imagery is shaped by an art practice rooted in restraint—negative space, earth-toned palettes, and the quiet tension between form and void. These are not just photographs; they are echoes.
This is a love letter in chiaroscuro.
A requiem in pigment.
A devotion to the untamed.
Through my lens, I stand with the voiceless—against the spectacle of trophies, against confinement, against the quiet erasure of species we are losing in real time.
Art can remember what the world forgets.
Africa had been my dream since childhood, a longing that finally took shape in the midst of life’s upheaval. Newly single, raising two boys, searching for purpose—I set out on a journey I feared would be heavy with heartbreak and doubt.
But Africa taught me this: even in struggle, there is beauty. Exquisite, raw, and unshaken.
I was reborn in this ancient jeweled kingdom.
As I connect with the wild and cherish the earth’s beauty, life unfolds as a breathtaking, romantic journey.
