Her work has explored the abandoned
diamond mining sites, particularly those of
Kolmanskop in the southern
Namib desert. Kohl's photographs capture how the mining town, abandoned in 1954, has been reclaimed by waves of sand. She returned to the site over several decades to capture the changing light, shadow, and architectural wear. During her visits, she would sit and watch the dunes shift in the rooms before deciding to photograph. The final series spent four years in production (1993–1997). Kohl's 1997
Elisabeth Bay series explored the abandoned Namibian diamond mining site by the same name. The mine was active between 1908 and 1948. Her pictures document the remnants of how people once occupied the mining town. Its desert-eroded ruins show both where people once lived and the effects of time and nature on human enterprise. She joined the Professional Photographers in Southern Africa (PPSA) in 1989, received their President's Award in 1993, and was awarded a fellowship in fine art photography in 1998. Throughout the 1990s, she held solo exhibitions in
Windhoek,
Swakopmund, and
Cape Town, and at the
1995 Miss Universe beauty pageant in the Namibian capital. Kohl participated in group exhibitions in Windhoek and
Johannesburg, and in several
Standard Bank Namibia biennales, of which she won first prize in 2001. Her photographs were the "signature images" of the 2005
Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, held in
Bamako, Mali, after which they were exhibited internationally and donated to the Namibian national archives. Kohl published a book on the photographs,
Kolmanskop: Past and Present, a year prior. In 2007, Kohl exhibited at Voies Off at
Arles and began an
artist residency in
Bremen. Her photographs were also shown in a 2013 exhibition at the
Washington, D.C.–based
National Museum of African Art,
Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa. Kohl's works reside in private collections internationally and in the public collection of the
National Art Gallery of Namibia. == References ==