A Warm Winter is a photographic project - and a journey - through the deserts of the American West, following the paths of nomads who travel thousands of miles each year in search of a milder winter. It is also a reflection on alternative notions of home and belonging in the contemporary world.

Nomads are part of a vast and layered subculture made up of people with very different lives and backgrounds. Some travel out of necessity because they are unable to afford a home; others do so by choice. They may stay only a few days in some places and spend months in others. Plans are rarely fixed — they are made and unmade along the way.

During the winter months, thousands of nomads move between the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts. They work, build relationships and form temporary communities before moving on again when temperatures become unbearable. “See you down the road” is how they bid each other farewell. Sometimes, they really do.

This project began in the winter of 2021, when Albertazzi left Los Angeles to settle in a small town in the Mojave Desert. Her first encounters with the nomads travelling through the region allowed her to discover — and fall in love with — a landscape that initially felt unfamiliar, but which she would eventually choose as her home.

From 2023 to 2025, she lived in a campervan with her family, travelling full-time in order to continue documenting a way of life that, at first glance, may appear unstable but which, for many of the people she met along the way, represents a form of freedom and independence as well a different way of belonging to a place.

Martina Albertazzi is an Italian documentary photographer whose work explores family dynamics, motherhood, identity, and relationships between individuals and communities. Combining portrait and landscape photography, she develops projects that unfold over periods of months or years. She favours a slow approach and often returns to photograph  the same people and places, building relationships that often continue beyond the photographic narrative.

Albertazzi lived in the United States for many years, first in Los Angeles and later in the Mojave Desert, California. Over time, the desert became a central subject in her work. At first glance, the landscape may appear hostile, yet it reveals its full complexity and beauty to those willing to observe it with attention and presence.

From 2023 to 2025, she travelled full-time with her family in a campervan while working on A Warm Winter, a project documenting the nomadic community of the American West.

She currently lives in Umbria, in the hills north of Rome. She continues to focus on her personal projects as well as editorial and commercial commissions. Her work has been published internationally in The Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, El País, Die Zeit, Internazionale and Robb Report.