"You die here, you dry here," they say in Chile’s Atacama Desert. There was not a blade of grass in Poncochile's Cemetery. It does not rain here. This the driest desert on earth. I saw this cemetery as a series of layers in space, and created the perception of depth by relating one layer to another. A wideangle perspective is essential. Using a 24mm wideangle converter lens on my camera, I anchored the shot around the boulders in the foreground. These boulders echo the shapes of the hills that rise in the background. Instead of centering the boulders in the frame, I move them off to the right, leaving a path on the right for the eye to flow into the image. The middle layer is the cemetery itself, frail wooden crosses adrift in a field of sand. The third layer is a progression of the rolling barren hills of the Atacama itself, where nothing lives – an eerie echo of the nature of the cemetery itself. All three layers interact, supporting each other to express the nature of this place. Poncochile is a small town in a very hard place, and this is where it buries its dead.