Finding Skywalker’s House: Photos of Old Movie Sets in North Africa

If you're a Star Wars fan, you might be looking at the photo above and wondering – "Hey, isn't that one of those moisture vaporators from the Skywalker farm there by that man who is begging?" And you'd be right.

But here's the thing. After the movie people packed up and left, the film sets stayed behind. And because of the dry desert climate, they stayed and stayed, slowly rusting away or being swallowed by sand. Italian visual artist Ra di Martino wanted to photograph these sets. She's not the first, but her goal was not necessarily to say something about them, but about the ways we remember them.

"Star Wars was one of the first films I watched. I must've been around four-years-old," di Martino says. "I really loved it. And I watched it many times. You know, it was an eerie and well-shot film that actually left a lot in me. It was a fun film, but it had beautiful images."

Particularly those desert shots.

They created an entirely new world. No, seriously. George Lucas went to locations across North Africa, to very edge of the desert, to have the sets built.

And di Martino, a visual artist, was kicking around on Google Earth a few years back, when she spotted something that looked familiar in some tourist photos that had been uploaded.

It was the old Star Wars sets – well, parts of them – still there in the North African desert.

"I couldn't believe my eyes, because obviously it seemed incredible that there was some actual, real materials left from such a big film that made a lot of my memories from childhood."

Di Martino knew that the sets have been photographed before, and that fans know all about the Star Wars "ruins."

We've talked about it on The World before.

"I just find it very poetic to see these trashy, cheap materials in the middle of nowhere, to see how these ruins decayed in such a fast way compared to our memory of them," di Martino says.

So, a few years ago, she embarked on a series of trips to Tunisia and Morocco to photograph the old film sets.

She found the house Luke Skywalker lived in. It's in Tunisia, and it was falling apart just a few miles from Algerian border.

In Morocco, she shot the picture above…a man begging in the ruins of one Star Wars set. The film grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.

Since she did her photo series, certain sands have shifted.

One set that had been covered, and then uncovered, in sand storms has, in fact, been almost covered again.

And, thanks to crowd-funding, Star Wars fans "refurbished" the Skywalker house.

Di Martino says it proves her point.

"These memories are so strong in us that we don't really realize how much they formed us. And if you think adult people, as their main hobby, go and refurbish something like this, which is so useless, well. No, but I can understand it. They probably had lots of fun, you know?"

Meanwhile, she wryly notes, in her native Italy…the ruins of Pompeii are crumbling, and little effort is being made to save them.