Mongolia - Traveling with a sheep

When going through this book you should take your time, like the traveler who gets off his horse at an ovoo. He picks up a stone and adds it to the pile, to appease the deities. The ovoo is a heap of rocks, wood, bones and even some pieces of manmade waste products. Ceremonial silk scarfs have been tied to a stake, torn to shreds by violent gusts of wind. Each piece the ovoo is made of is an episode of a journey which began in the trackless steppe and trailed off in the haze of distant mountains.

Traveling Mongolia, the authors had to recognize imponderability as a higher power, too, and had to come to terms with it. They calmly accepted what happened – or what didn’t happen. In this serene state of mind they took photos of an overwhelming country and the simple lifestyle of its people.

This volume does not excel with picturesque architecture and folkloristic dancing. Instead, details are shown which others would have overlooked. In brilliant monochrome a strange world is presented – ranging from the vast emptiness of archaic scenery to the sometimes surrealistic everyday life of a post-communist nomadic society. The texts are sketchy impressions. They do not explain, that would be needless anyhow. The direct language of images covers an unusual choice of topics: vast steppe, towns,
primordial mountain regions, markets, cloud formations, inquisitive kids, filling stations, mountain lakes or a privy in the middle of nowhere.