The request came from the CICM priests in Mongolia. Come and photograph it, document it properly. They arranged an official media pass. That is the whole of how I came to be standing on a road in Ulaanbaatar on the first of September 2023, waiting for a motorcade.
It arrived as motorcades do — black vans, then a black Toyota Century with the plate SCV 1. I made the frame of the cars. Then the window came past me and Pope Francis was in it with his hand raised, and I made that one too.
That is the first photograph in the set, and looking at it now I can see exactly what it is: a picture taken from the outside. Correct exposure, correct moment, no closer than the road allowed. A press frame. I was pleased with it at the time.
A country of fourteen hundred
You need one number to understand what happened that weekend.
In 2023 the entire Catholic community of Mongolia was about 1,450 people. Not 1,450 at a parish. In the country. It is the smallest flock a pope has ever flown that far to visit, and he was the first to go.
The welcome was not small. Before anything churchly happened at all there were archers drawing, riders coming at the gallop, a morin khuur ensemble playing in the open, a masked Cham dancer, a woman in a deel holding out a khadag. Wrestlers. It was Mongolia introducing itself, and it had nothing to do with the Church and everything to do with the guest.
I photographed all of it and enjoyed all of it, and I was still outside.
The cathedral
The second day was Sükhbaatar Square in the morning — the honour guard in red and blue, the formalities — and then the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.
Two things happened there that changed the pictures.
The first is that I got close. Inside that cathedral the distances collapse: Missionaries of Charity in white and blue a few feet away, priests from Africa laughing in a pew, a wooden cross carried up the aisle, and Francis himself close enough that the long lens became the wrong tool. There are frames in that set where I have his whole face and nothing else.
The second is what I noticed while I was working. Somebody had spent the morning packing lunch boxes — rice and stew, hundreds of them, laid out in rows by volunteers. Outside, people were standing at police barriers under a banner carrying the visit’s motto, Hoping together. Old women in headscarves. Young volunteers in blue jackets who had clearly not slept.
None of that is a papal photograph. All of it is why the papal photographs matter.
The arena, and the flags
The Mass was on the third of September at the Steppe Arena, and it is the day I would keep if I could only keep one.
It began the way the whole visit had — dancers, the morin khuur again, a choir in pink lifting white hats. The offertory was carried up by people in deel. Green vestments, incense, an altar banked with flowers.
Then I turned the camera on the crowd, and that is where the story was.
In one frame, two sisters are holding a Mongolian flag beside a Vatican flag. In another, a few rows back, someone is holding up the flag of the People’s Republic of China. A few seats over, a Singapore flag.
About 2,500 people were in that arena. They had come from South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Russia, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan. Ninety Vietnamese made the journey with seven of their own bishops. Which means that for one afternoon, the visitors nearly doubled the entire Catholic population of Mongolia.
People had crossed borders — some of them at a cost I will not pretend to understand — to sit in a stadium in one of the emptiest countries on earth and be in the same room as this man.
I had already photographed that greeting without knowing it. It was the flag in the stands, three exposures earlier.
The moment
I should say plainly that I was not baptised. I went to Mongolia as a photographer with an assignment and a pass, and no expectation of anything happening to me.
Then Francis came through the arena in the white cart, and I was working the way you work — tracking, framing, waiting for the hand to come up. And he looked at me. Directly at me, blessing, and it landed as though he had said come, follow me.
I do not know how to write that in a way that sounds like reporting, so I will not try. I know what a subject looking down a lens is. I have made thousands of those frames. This was not that.
That is the second when it stopped being only photography.
Afterwards
I went home and I was baptised. I became Catholic.
That is not a sentence I expected to be writing about a photographic assignment, and I am aware of how it reads. But it is what happened, and leaving it out would make the rest of this dishonest. I went to Mongolia to photograph the smallest Catholic community in the world, and I came back and joined it.
What I brought home
Three days, one hundred and thirty-nine photographs I have kept, and a set that gets closer as it goes on — the car window, then the cathedral, then arm’s length.
The best of them is not of Francis at all. It is a room full of people who had come a very long way, in a country where their Church would fit into a single village, looking at one old man in white as though the distance had been worth it.
I thought I was there to record what was happening to them.
The full set from those three days is on SmugMug — day one, day two and day three.