Welcome to Far From
I founded Far From to share my love of wild places – where our phones go quiet, and we can lose ourselves in a different set of priorities.
Whatever your pace or purpose, Far From offers inspiration on travel in the natural world – whether camping under the stars in the Sahara Desert, hiking from hut to hut in the Alps, going on retreat in the wilderness of Nevada, or losing yourself in Scotland's quiet splendour.
Far From encourages immersive exploration through imaginative itineraries, concise guides, award-winning photography, original stories, moving image, Spotify playlists, and book recommendations.
I think that wild places bestow grace upon those who pass through them – developing our sense of wonder at the world and deepening our relationship with home when the journey is over.
Join me in the search for wild places – far from crowds and digital noise.
Nicholas Holt
Walking the Quirang on the Isle of Skye
ABOUT ME
I am a British photographer, writer, and creative director.
Far From is rooted in my passions for the journey, photography, visual art, books, anthropology, zen, and our relationship with wild places.
My guiding lights have been Bruce Chatwin, Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez, Robyn Davidson, Hamish Fulton, Gary Snyder and Robert Frank.
I remember first feeling what John Steinbeck described as ‘the ancient shudder’.
I came home from school one day to find a Khaki Land Rover, emblazoned with expedition stickers, parked on my parent's drive. It belonged to John Michael – a family friend and National Geographic photographer – who was on his way to cross the Sahara Desert.
I was nine years old and hadn’t been further than Wales.
I have never forgotten wanting to hop in that Land Rover.
As the years passed I rode on horseback through the foothills of the Tien Shan mountains, climbed Mount Roraima in Venezuela, explored previously untrodden areas of the Greenland icecap, hiked the Inca Trail, and climbed mountains in the Alps and the Himalayas.
Some of these trips were pre-internet; most were sparsely documented; taken using leave from my career as an advertising art director.
When I went freelance, I enrolled in the MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography course at LCC and started to document my journeys.
In 2020, just before the pandemic, I crossed the Sudan’s Bayuda Desert by camel and wrote about it for SUITCASE Magazine. In 2022, I finally made it to the Sahara Desert and published the story in JRNY Magazine. While I was in the Sahara, I made a photography project about ancient rock art that was shown at the Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition 2023.
After years of helping brands develop their voices, I was excited to be finding my own.
Looking back, the journeys that defined me were the ones I made as a child – wandering the countryside in Shropshire, allowing nature to seep into every pore.
As much as I am lured by faraway places, I love ‘the faraway nearby’ (to borrow a phrase from Georgia O’Keefe) – the Peak District, where I live.
Thank you for reading – I hope you get something out of the pages of this website.
“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.”