“After years living and photographing abroad, I embarked on this body of work in an attempt to understand a place I had left behind,” begins photographer Adam Ferguson in his latest photobook, Big Sky. “In the end, the people I met and the countries I travelled through taught me who I am as an Australian.”

Published by Gost, Big Sky is the culmination of a decade’s worth of shooting in the Australian interior. The project was initiated simply as a series of portraits, inspired by Richard Avedon’s seminal series In the American West. However, it slowly transformed over this period into something considerably more nuanced and complex – much like the world that Ferguson sought to photograph.

It was the outdated and misguided portrayals of the country’s ‘Outback’ in popular culture that first prompted the Sydney-based photographer to begin this journey, as he became convinced that a more accurate and heartfelt depiction of these landscapes and the people who inhabit them was possible.

“There is an international perception of the Outback steeped in Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin that is cliché. And from the Australian cities, the Outback is seen with nostalgia and national pride,” he says. “The realities of the bush however are complex and layered.”

As such, the body of work merges portraiture and landscape photography to tell a story of the Outback, how it has changed, and the challenges it currently faces, including climate change, globalisation, animal agriculture and mining, among many others.

Central to the project are the Indigenous communities who have called this country home for more than 65,000 years but have found themselves dispossessed of their land and culture in the last few centuries by colonising forces. To talk about the land is to talk about the traditional custodians who have lived on and protected it since time immemorial, and naturally these communities feature heavily in the work.

In the book’s introductory text, Ferguson acknowledges how he was indebted to Aboriginal land and its traditional custodians, who “generously accepted me and shared stories that helped inform these photographs”.

Ferguson says capturing these portraits and landscapes was a very slow process, involving extensive travel across Australia’s interior and many failed attempts at photographing the subjects he felt were integral to the story. “I drove 70,000km over 2022 and 2023 alone,” he recalls. “Access in Australia can be hard – most of the large mining companies wouldn’t let me photograph their sites and the same went for the big pastoral companies. People often thought I was an animal rights activist. So I had to rely on personal networks and some luck when finding subjects.”

Despite the challenges he faced, the long journey proved to be a restorative experience for Ferguson, who notes that years spent documenting war and conflict in other countries around the world such as Iraq and Afghanistan had left him longing for a deeper connection to Australia.

“Returning to Australia was a form of self-prescribed therapy,” he tells us. “It felt important to reconnect with my own country and people.” The slow, meandering nature of the project also meant that he had truly memorable encounters with people and places across Australia, with most people being receptive to him.

“I tended to offer myself to the moment and I would either be accepted or not. If I wasn’t, I kept moving, if I was, I stayed. I let the journey take me and spent time with people who wanted me,” he explains. “There aren’t many photographers travelling in remote areas so sometimes I was curious about people. And I believe everyone wants to share their story, even people who seem closed off. Showing interest in a fellow human and asking questions opened doors and I ended up sitting with people in places I never could have imagined.”

Big Sky by Adam Ferguson is published by Gost; gostbooks.com