The big picture: the faces and places of the Australian outback

It is said that we spend the first decades of our lives trying to escape from home and the subsequent years looking for ways to return to it. The Australian photographer Adam Ferguson grew up in a town called Dubbo, in the outback of New South Wales. His family moved to the coast when he was 12; as soon as he could, as an adult, he departed for New York, working in conflict zones in Afghanistan and elsewhere. About 10 years ago, his thoughts returned to the places he had left behind.

In 2014, Ferguson began to work on a project he calls Big Sky , travelling more than 30,000km through the Australian bush, photographing the inhabitants of mining towns, sheep stations and remote settlements. "Part of the experience of living in this huge, sweeping landscape is the relationship each individual has to form with this isolating environment," Ferguson has said of this work. "It made sense to position everybody in the spaces they have to occupy. I wanted to construct a scene which complemented, or helped to reinforce, that person's story."

In the case of the two young women he photographed at Wadeye, a remote Indigenous township in the Northern Territories, the story was about their desire to be connected to a collective beyond the horizons they could see. In a new book of his Big Sky photographs, Ferguson – who has been nominated for this year's Taylor Wessing portrait prize – thanks "the traditional custodians who generously accepted me and shared stories that helped inform these photographs" and "acknowledges more than 65,000 years of storytelling that has taken place across what we now call Australia". The songlines in this case appear to include words and lyrics from the woman who looks out from the back of his subjects' T-shirts; Swifties migrate everywhere.