Guy Tal creates photographs of Utah landscapes that no one else can create. To him, that is the entire point of his artform.

“The purpose of the photograph is to express a subjective feeling,” he said, “not just to document an objective appearance.”

Tal favors a style known as intimate landscapes, often narrowing his focus on details within the larger scene. This sometimes results in a panoramic shot of canyons and buttes that omits the horizon and sky, or a shot that zooms in a single tiny plant emerging from dried, cracked mud.

When Tal ventures out from his Torrey home to set up camp in the Utah desert, he seldom stays for fewer than four days.

“Four days is where things begin to get interesting,” he said.

He will often stay for up to two weeks. He brings his camera, of course, but he has no set objective other than to be outdoors and experience what the desert has to offer.

“I just want to live outside,” he said. “My office is out in the desert in a tent instead of brick and mortar.”

When it comes to choosing a spot to camp, Tal follows a simple rule: If there is even one other vehicle at the trailhead, he will move on and look elsewhere. Once he has found a good place for a basecamp, he sets up his tent, as well as a gas stove that he uses to cook hearty meals in his 12-inch cast-iron skillet: stir fries, pancakes and more.

After a few days in his basecamp, he will look at topographical maps to find interesting places to explore. Tal’s favorite locales are almost always so remote and little-visited that they don’t have names – places that offer the solitude that he cherishes.

Each photograph he takes evokes its own particular emotion, but if there is overarching emotion to his body of work, it is a sense of awe. That feeling of awe is one that is at once intensely impressive and intensely threatening, Tal said – and there’s no denying the desert is both of those things.

“For me, a desert is a more living place than most other places,” he said. “Life isn’t about quantity; it’s about life asserting itself against challenges.”

The Israeli-born Tal sees the sublime in this landscape, invoking the novelist Wendell Berry, who said, “It was the desert, not the temple, that gave us the prophets.”