The Golden Eagle Festival is held on the first weekend of October in Bayan-Ölgii, in the far west of Mongolia. It has run since 1999. Somewhere between seventy and a hundred hunters compete, out of around three hundred still practising, nearly all of them in that one province.
It is also, by now, a photography event. I counted more long lenses than I could count riders.
The festival, briefly
Costumes, fur hats, embroidered coats, birds held up for the crowd, horse games in the dust behind. It photographs easily, which is the problem. Everyone standing on that field came away with the same picture, mine included, because the event is arranged so that the picture is available to everybody at once.
I am not complaining about it. A festival that keeps a practice alive, and pays for it, is worth more than my preference for quiet. But I knew on the first afternoon that my photographs of it were ordinary.
Two days later
On the seventh we drove out to stay with a Kazakh family.
There were camels outside, a ridge behind the camp, and no crowd at all.
The ridge
Two riders went up with their birds. The light was low and the ground was the colour of the coats, which is the sort of coincidence you cannot arrange and should not waste.
Close to, the bird is heavier than it looks in any photograph. The arm holding it is braced against the body and the man’s whole posture is built around the weight. That is the thing the festival frames never show, because at the festival you are always too far away.
The frame I kept
The eagle’s head and the man’s head in the same plane, a hand’s width apart, both looking the same way. Neither of them is performing. It is a working relationship photographed at working distance, which is the whole argument for leaving the arena.
What I would photograph differently
I would give the festival one morning instead of two days, and spend the rest of the time with one family. The festival tells you that eagle hunting exists. It cannot tell you what it is like to live with a bird that size, and two days is not long enough to learn, but it is long enough to see that the question is the interesting one.
The eagle festival and homestay sets are both on SmugMug.