In reality, what I felt as a “crossing of the desert” was the gradual disappearance of the magazines I used to work for, or the adapting of the surviving ones to the tastes of to a less sophisticated audience. The best answer I could find was was to start working as an author, rather than as a free-lance contributor. Or – as I put it to myself – to “be my own client”. My first personal project, on which I worked for several years, was ‘Portraits of Trees’.