Eva
€900
It was the middle of winter in Siberia. A horse rider, she took a break near the hills surrounding Baikal Lake.
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It was the middle of winter in Siberia. A horse rider, she took a break near the hills surrounding Baikal Lake.
Fakir Mohammed; he was the oldest at Dode Khuda’s wedding. A home-spun cloth made of hemp, beautiful turban, and the right stare, respect.
Boulders pushed by the Garum Cheshma glacier, near Boroghil pass on the Afghan border. Hindukush, Pakistan.
Photo studio, Uttarakhand, India.
Her mother was busy doing p’tok, a thick bread cooked right inside the fire. Gul knew the herd was back, she stepped out and found the goats for milking. Tea will follow. Warm summer settlement, Waramdeh Valley.
We arrived at night, guessing our way up a steep hill. There was a house but no light; we called out. Darvish eventually arrived, he remembered me from 12 years ago! He gave hay to our donkeys and invited us inside. We sat next to the fire. Gul Dista, his daughter-in-law, was drying her hair in front of the open hearth, quiet moment like many others. Summer 2017.
The return home after fetching wood for cooking in Khuramabad pasture, a two hour walk from Hussaini village, across the Hunza valley riverbed. Karakoram, Pakistan.
Ikhbal (15 years old) has been crying off and on for two days. Recently married, she is both sad to leave her family nest and anxious about her future at her husband’s camp.
Fifteen year-old Iqbal has been married for two months. Today is the veil ceremony, where she will exchange her childhood crimson veil for a married woman’s white headdress. She struggles and cries as the older women around her get ready to fasten the white veil on her head.
My favorite place in the world, between states, sky and earth, defying borders. It was our second trip to Irshad pass. I went back 6 or 7 times, in snow and wind, excitement to my stomach, a fleeting vision of heaven and then we must head down into the valley.
The 64 residents of the remote east Greenland village of Isortoq still hunt and fish but combine traditional Inuit foods with purchases from the supermarket, the large red building in the foreground. A favorite dish: seal dipped in ketchup and mayonnaise. In the middle of winter I lived here for 10 days, documenting the life of a hunting family.
Young Juma is particularly fond of his father’s horse. Qara Jilga summer camp, Afghanistan.
Juma Boi is grabbing a fish that he hit by throwing stones in the water. Even though the Pamir has a lot of fish in summer, Kyrgyz nomads are not especially talented with catching them using a line and a hook, seeing it as a pointless exercise – they are herders in their core.
The last chicken: Er Ali Boi tried to breed chicken in his camp, but at 4200 meters his enterprise wasn’t a success, except for the entertainment it brought to his nephew, the young Juma Boi.
Mareile stands on an immersed boulder at the Kachura lake, heart of the Karakoram mountains. We lived in this village for a few months, doing volunteer teaching. Nearest phone was a 5-hour drive, all before the internet. We just soaked it in.
Outside Wuruchan’s home, his Kalashnikov lay in the soft grass, unguarded, wrapped in flowers. Death and beauty?
“Kandaisyz? How are you?” Fighting the wind, a young Kyrgyz comes to greet us on the frozen Wakhan river.
An earliest abstract shot, playing with obstructing the lens with various substances. These are the dunes of Skardu, near where we lived, in the back is Karpocho mountain.
Stubborn and strong. On an icy stretch, Katchga (meaning “beige”) the leading yak, refuses to go on, too slippery… 16-year old Nematullah, a Kyrgyz on his way up home, will have the last word.
A boy plays on the wall of the family’s mud house in Kermin village, in the Chapursan River Valley. Karakoram, Pakistan.
Entrance to the Little Pamir. Rolling hills, leftover from an ancient glacial outflow, the snow wrapping around it. Here is chocolate cream and the last thing that I can think of is ice-cream!
It was midday. A couple of weeks of altitude trekking and simple food got me lethargic; i laid under a tree. Khudo Boz came by, all ready to cut barley, asked if I wanted to join. I lifted my camera, his outfit revealing years of hard work.
The kindness of strangers. Bringing apples to the visiting guest. Karakoram, Pakistan.
I was riding a horse, trying not to get my teeth knocked out. Whip in mouth, a Kyrgyz man steers his horse in a game of buzkashi, a competition akin to polo—except a headless goat carcass takes the place of the ball. Buzkashi is the Afghan national sport. The Kyrgyz call it ulak tartysh, or “kid grabbing.”
Shrine, Wakhan Corridor, Afghanistan.
“And what’s behind that one?”
My two sons Timoté and Iluka and the Kumtag desert. Xinjiang, China.
According to NASA’s satellite data, the Dasht-e Lut desert is the hottest spot on Earth. The beauty of this desert is a major reason the UNESCO inscribed the Lut Desert on its World Heritage List. Iran.
Marbet, a seven year-old Afghan Kyrgyz girl, had just returned home from watching over her father’s sheep. I was taking picture of her brother, and she just sat there. Her red cheeks are the result of the extreme cold that affects the Afghan Pamir throughout winter.
Snow in August. We slept in our tent, right next to this Kyrgyz camp. She came to invite us for “chai” and stood there a second, waiting for us to get ready, gazing at her home, all she ever knew.
We stopped the old Russian jeep, a UAZ. There it was, a petrol station, protected with a lightning rod, sitting all alone in the empty steppe of the Gobi desert.
Near the eastern end of the inhabited Wakhan corridor, where roads dwindle to footpaths, a girl twists the tail of the family cow to hurry it toward their home in the village of Nishtkhowr.
Fighting his way through a gale, Ooroon Boi looks for water for his horse on his way down to the lower Wakhan valley.
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