This paper draws on pictorial treatment of deserts by nineteenth-century European artists to examine contemporary photographic images of this landscape. With a focus on images that use aerial perspectives as the compositional strategy, the paper explains why the pictorial tactic of atmospheric ambiguation wherein the horizon line is obfuscated by, for example, the hazy rendering of crepuscular light or engulfing sandstorms has endured across centuries and how atmospherics contribute to imaginaries that see deserts as conceptual rather than physical spaces. The paintings of nineteenth-century artists Augustus Osborne Lamplough, Gustave Guillaumet, Charles Théodore Frère, and Eugène Fromentin allow us to conceptualize how the notion of ambiguity was used as a dominant pictorial strategy in English and French nineteenth-century depictions of Middle Eastern and North African deserts in contrast to the meticulous realism of quintessential Orientalist figurative works, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s celebrated painting "The Snake Charmer" (1879). This atmospheric obfuscation was not intended to generate confusion, but rather acted as a source of imperial power in the expression of the dual attitudes Europeans held towards the deserts of North Africa – for some they were spaces of desolation and death, while others considered them ahistorical expanses whose solitude offered spiritual rejuvenation countering the overstimulation of modern cities. This nineteenth-century paradigm has both continuation and consequences in the work of contemporary photographers, Sophie Ristelhueber and Fazal Sheikh, both of whom have used aerial perspectives to capture desert landscapes. My analysis of Ristelhueber’s series, "Fait" (1992) will foreground the artist’s unconscious perpetuation of Orientalist tropes by leveraging the abstraction of the aerial view to exploit ambiguity in the depiction of the post-war Kuwaiti desert, while my discussion of Sheikh’s Desert Bloom (2011) reveals his disruption of the desert’s essentialization by contextualizing the images within local knowledge developed in dialogue with Negev Bedouins.