Santha Faiia

Santha Faiia (married name Santha Faiia Hancock) launched her career as a photographer of ancient and sacred sites in 1990 at the ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY in London with her exhibition ETHIOPIAN TRILOGY, opened by Her Royal Highness Princess Anne. From 1990, Faiia began to work closely with her husband, bestselling author Graham Hancock. Faiia's photography illustrated THE SIGN AND THE SEAL (1992), Hancock's investigation of Ethiopia's claim to be the last resting place of the lost Ark of the Covenant. Subsequently, Faiia supplied all the photography for Hancock's major international bestseller FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS (published in 1995 with more than 5 million copies sold). In 1998 Faiia's large-format book of photography, HEAVEN'S MIRROR, with text by Graham Hancock, was published and became a No 1 bestseller. Faiia's images from sacred sites as far afield as the temples of Angkor in Cambodia and the great pyramids of Giza in Egypt bring to life a lost world and "achieve the rare feat of making you feel you are there'"(Western Mail). Faiia worked closely with Hancock on UNDERWORLD (2002), her photographs of the many ancient underwater ruins off the coast of Japan, all around the Pacific, off Indonesia and Malaysia, off India, and in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Caribbean adding a whole new dimension to her work. She also photographed SUPERNATURAL: MEETINGS WITH THE ANCIENT TEACHERS OF MANKIND (published 2005), putting unique images of the ancient rock art of South Africa before a global public. In 2013, Faiia's photographs of Easter Island were presented at the VATICAN ETHNOLOGICAL MUSEUM contextualising a special exhibition of Easter Island artefacts. In 2014 a second exhibition at the VATICAN ETHNOLOGICAL MUSEUM, this time on Indonesia, was again contextualised with a collection of Faiia's photographs. Subsequently Faiia worked closely with Hancock to capture the photographs for the international bestseller Magicians of the Gods (2015) and for America Before (2019), an instant New York Times top-ten bestseller.