Dust in the Wind – Behind the Lens at the 2025 Dakar Rally

This story has been edited and condensed from its original version as published in the Summer 2025 issue of Vicarious magazine.

Chasing the Dakar Rally is equal parts beauty and brutality. One moment you’re standing in awe beneath a Martian-like rock formation, the next you’re wondering if exhaustion has a physical limit. The highs are euphoric. The lows—soul-rattling.

The bivouac is a sensory overload. Three meals a day in a mess hall with 3,000 racers, crew, and media all enduring the same chaos. Generators hum. Engines roar. Announcements blare. Sleep becomes a luxury, stolen in quick bursts—maybe in the back of a Land Cruiser or standing in the sun, eyes closed, waiting for the whine of a dirt bike to break the silence.

By the halfway point, the desert has claimed hundreds. Those who remain are held together by kabobs, lukewarm Pepsi, and muscle memory. You don’t count miles. You count down the days—until the start, then until it’s over.

As photographers and journalists, we capture fleeting moments: a rider cresting a dune, a weary face at sunrise, a celebratory fist pump after a brutal stage. These glimpses flood social media, gone in a blink, lost in the scroll. But behind every shot is a story, a day that started at 5am, a truck packed with gear and grit, racing to the next vantage point before the racers arrive.

This is the side of Dakar that doesn’t always make the feed—the silence before the storm, the quiet camaraderie, the raw beauty of a sun-drenched desert morning. We’re here to share it with you.