A 13-year-old eagle huntress in Mongolia

A photographer who snapped what could be the world’s only girl hunting with a golden eagle says watching her work was an amazing sight. (The sub editor who says the photographer ‘snapped’ this impressive sequence of images should be sent back to school where they might learn that photographers do not snap) Beyond that this is a very otherworldly set of images and much better for not having been snapped but crafted

The BBC continues

Most children, Asher Svidensky says, are a little intimidated by golden eagles. Kazakh boys in western Mongolia start learning how to use the huge birds to hunt for foxes and hares at the age of 13, when the eagles sit heavily on their undeveloped arms. Svidensky, a photographer and travel writer, shot five boys learning the skill – and he also photographed Ashol-Pan.

“To see her with the eagle was amazing,” he recalls. She was a lot more comfortable with it, a lot more powerful with it and a lot more at ease with it.”

See more images here

A Nomadic Life: By Photographer Hamid Sardar-Afkhami

From the excellent Anthony Luke blog comes this photo essay

Hamid Sardar-Afkhami is a professional photographer as well as a scholar of Tibetan and Mongol languages who received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. After moving to Nepal in the late 1980’s and exploring Tibet and the Himalayas for more than a decade, he traveled to Outer Mongolia. Seeing the opportunity to create a single important collection concentrating on the last country where the majority of the population are still nomads, Sardar-Afkhami set up a mobile studio camp. With his arsenal of cameras of different formats, he mounts yearly expeditions into the Mongolian outback to document her nomadic traditions.

see all the images here