Wintering Thoughts

In December 2019, we spent two weeks traveling 2,343km across five provinces in Western Mongolia, visiting remote herding communities devastated by climate change and land degradation.

Winter is the harshest time of the year for herders, who try and temper unrelenting uncertainty with a centuries-old self-assurance: feeling yet not believing their way of life could be coming to an end.

Mongolian herders call it wintering: the art of surviving one more winter.

Two weeks felt like an eternity. In such rough conditions, working day and night without a break, we wondered if it was possible to understand the human and scientific mysteries of such traumatic decay.

We conducted close to 50 in-depth interviews with every possible actor in this tragedy of the commons, photographing everyone and everything, in a forward-moving motion that became more physical than intellectual as the days went by.

Back home, we realized that narrative photography for this project was not going to be easy.

Because the December light in Western Mongolia changes all the time, we decided that the sequence of photographs would progress from morning to night, a natural flow of images from dawn to dusk.

In all our projects we aim to make the photographer invisible.

In Mongolia, it is impossible to pretend to yourself that you’re not there: every part of your body is awake to the difficulties of the landscape and the weather, too far from comfort to pretend otherwise.

We take comfort now in looking at these pictures, feeling that we were never there. The pictures were as far from our control as the cruel unpredictability of the weather.

At the same time, all the beauty in the world couldn’t have stopped us from feeling the perplexity of defeat and surrender, which is what we still feel today.

Check a preview of Wintering here on this site, where you can also download the entire report for free.