Anthropologist Hamid Sardar-Afkhami shares his photos of a lifestyle that's vanishing - at great loss to us all
Their outlook is dismal, but they are, in a way, immortalised - in the series "Mongolia: Platinum Prints", currently on view at Bangkok's Serindia Gallery.
Platinum prints are esteemed for tonal range, detail and longevity that the customary silver-gelatin type can't match and digital prints can't even approach. Great craftsmen like Robert Mapplethorpe and Irving Penn have relied on them.
They prints are produced by directly exposing the negatives to platinum deposits that are brushed onto the paper.
Iranian-born American Sardar-Afkhami is a Harvard-educated anthropologist and a scholar of the Tibetan and Mongol languages as well as a professional photographer.
He explored Tibet and the Himalayas for a decade before finding a place among the nomads in Outer Mongolia in 2000. For the next 10 years he studied their customs and witnessed their gradual separation from the natural and spiritual environment.
"There were times," Sardar-Afkhami says of Mongolia, "when I was totally cut off from urban civilisation, yet I always felt strangely embraced in this peaceful yet untamed country."
All he needed were some vegetables to eat and a readiness to cover long distances by horse, camel and reindeer.
He set out to record the nomads' spiritual relationship to their totem animals, focusing on the seasonal rhythms of migration across the steppes, deserts and mountain forests, following shamans, bandits and hunters.
The images capture the paradox of the nomads, in whom dignity and strength, cruelty and beauty are juxtaposed.
Sardar-Afkhami says Mongolia is among of the last places in Asia where the ancient spiritual values of early pastoral nomads and hunters have survived, especially the perception of man's essential unity with animals.
"Mongolia is a vast landscape the size of Western Europe, the cradle of Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic peoples whose diversity of cultural forms and beliefs are vital to our understanding of the past," he says.
He discovered that what was important wasn't the time he spent getting to know his subjects but the time it took for him to actually "exist" in their eyes.
"Like every person, a photographer is a screen, a mirror unto his environment, but a sentient mirror that also reflects inwards," Sardar-Afkhami explains. "The process of creating a photograph ? depends in large part on what I do when the mirror starts to reflect inwards."
During his life out in the Mongol outback he was forced to give up his illusions about "freedom". Over time, freedom of speech and religion became insignificant next to the freedom from hunger, drought - and wolves.
"It was at this point I started to exist in the eyes of my companions."
While Soviet and Chinese communism suppressed Buddhism and shamanism, Mongolia's nameless mysticism was tenacious in its powerful mix of superstition and taboo with ideals of solidarity and social progress.
Sardar-Afkhami found nothing written down, only what anthropologists call a "little tradition" - a substratum of heresies, fetishes and rites that lie beneath the "high traditions" of orthodox religions.
"And if this nameless religion were to appoint a high priesthood," he says, "it would be the personalities I photographed."
He found an old man in the Gobi who could make camels cry, and who adopted an orphaned calf by playing his fiddle.
There was a Buryat lama who would call wolves to his doorstep by singing an ancient song.
In the Altai foothills Sardar-Afkhami rode with Kazak shepherds who taught him how to capture golden eagles from the nest and train them to hunt - and then return them to the wild.
"This ecological mysticism linking animal and man became the guiding theme of my art," he says.
Mongolia's hunters and shamans still hunt and heal the ancestral way, through a profound identification with their totems and "spirit animals", which act as escorts between the worlds, lifting the souls of dead warriors to heaven.
The bones of fast racehorses are traditionally laid to rest at the highest point on the landscape, which is inhabited by the souls of ancestors who have merged with the sabdak mountain spirits.
Kazak nomads see an intimate connection between their eagles and their clan heroes. The eagle is an ancient symbol of the union between the earth and the sky, serving as mediator and messenger. Attila's Huns embossed the winged raptor on their coins and the Turks on their royal crowns.
Such are "the timeless icons of a quickly vanishing world", Sardar-Afkhami says.
The nomads are threatened by overgrazing of their customary domain, the gold mining that poisons watersheds, and the loss of food sources to large-scale commercial hunting.
BEFORE THEY VANISH
- "Mongolia: Platinum Prints" continues until February 28 at the Serindia Gallery at OP Garden on Soi Charoenkrung 36 off Charoenkrung Road in Bangrak, Bangkok.
- Call (02) 238 6410, e-mail serindiagallery@gmail.com or visit www.Serindia|Gallery.com.
