The Photo Comes Last: Shooting in Mongolia

After the Faction team returned last year from the wild steppe and glaciated shadows of Mongolia’s Altai, the trip’s chief photographer, American photojournalist Matthew Tufts returned a collection of shots that stretched way past what we’d expect for a ski brand’s content shoot.

This one stuck out on our editing table; a shot from Western Mongolia that has nothing to do with skiing like we know it. A local man in a marmot fur coat, thirty of them hand-stitched together, stands with his back to the camera. He’s on a pair of handmade wooden skis lined on the bottom with horse hair. A carved wooden rifle is slung across his shoulder. He's walking toward a high alpine camp on a patch of snow, finished with a pair of pyjama pants visible below the hem of his coat. Shot on 35mm Ektar 100, sprocket holes, the works. Matthew was there to take it.

He was on the phone to me from a coffee shop in northern British Columbia, fresh from a trail run, living out of a vehicle for a few days. That felt right for this guy who’s almost always on the road out of his home in Revelstoke.

Tufts carries a 35mm point-and-shoot on every expedition, small enough to sit neatly in a chest pocket. He's shot magazine covers on it. His scans and digital images have gone on to run in major outdoor brand campaigns. People still look at those images and assume they're behind-the-scenes, stuff of hobbies, spontaneous, and above all, real.

"Which is exactly what I want," he says. "They're more relaxed. They think it's just for fun. And that mentality makes for better portraits every time."

The logic is pretty simple, and tight. Tufts quipped that you’ll pull out a 70-200mm lens, and people clock it immediately. They straighten up, think about their face, wonder where it's going to end up. A tiny point-and-shoot barely registers and functions mostly incognito. People keep doing what they were doing, and you catch them there. Tufts sends his rolls to the lab in the US for full-frame scans, sprocket holes included, which gives whoever's doing the layout room to treat the format itself as part of the design. The physicality of the film becomes part of the image.

"It all comes down to the process," he says. "You just get it out, snap the photo, keep moving. You're more in the moment."

The man in the coat is Bambara. He was the trip's cook and became a sort of supporting hero in the expedition for “150 Hours from Home”. A member of the Tuvan people–the traditional inhabitants of the Mongolian Altai–he hunts marmot, wears them, prepares his meals from them, and owns a pair of wooden skis carved in the traditional manner, horsehair skins on the base. His coat, relayed through their guide and translator, came from thirty examples. He made it with his own hands.

He was also, as it turned out, mostly a snowboarder. How versatile.

Tufts had known going in that the Altai's relationship with skiing was one of the most interesting parts of the story to document. The region has a serious stake in the claim to being the actual birthplace of skiing, predating any national narrative you've heard about it. China made a push around the time of the Olympics. Russia has its own proposal to bring to the table. The Tuvan people have the petroglyphs: pre-Bronze Age rock carvings on a black hillside above basecamp, hunters on skis chasing ibex across stone. While shooting the film, the entire team tracked them down, and Tufts swooped in quickly to shoot them on a roll of Portra 800.

"It seemed fitting to shoot something that old in analog format," he says.

Borders in the Altai have shifted constantly, conquered and reconquered across centuries, right up to the current tangle of Chinese, Russian, Mongolian and Kazakh territory meeting in one imposing mountain range. Through the push and pull of developing politics, kingdoms, empires and tsardoms, the skiing remained constant. "It transcended all the geopolitical shifts," Tufts says. "It belongs to the history of the people of that area." Bambara is a living thread of that. On a storm day during the trip, he strapped on the wooden skis, climbed the hill above camp, and throat sang into the fog.

Getting from Ulaanbaatar to basecamp took the better part of a week. A 30-hour overnight bus, then two days grinding through the Altai in Soviet-era 4x4s, then a camel train for the terrain no vehicle could handle. The 4x4s broke down six times on a single drive. Each time, the drivers dug parts out from somewhere in the back of the van, fixed it in about twenty minutes, and got moving again. No conversation about it, no visible stress. "They're just like, yeah, this happens," Tufts says. Just another thing on the road.

During the longest halt, close to an hour, the crew spilled out into a pasture where a herd of sheep was moving through. A few lambs came running straight at them, curious rather than scared. Etienne Merel, Faction's lead cinematographer and the person behind the lens on nearly a decade of films, went over for a closer look. One of the lambs made a bold choice to come close.

Etienne picked it up, carried it back to the herd, and set the young lamb down. It turned around and trotted straight back to him. He tried again, but with the same result. Third time’s a charm. It took a group of local kids coming through to move the flock along before the lamb finally went with it, and even then, it seemed like a close call.

"I think both the lamb fell in love with him and Etienne definitely fell in love with the lamb," Tufts says.

It was a shame many of these moments couldn’t make it to the final cut of the film. That's exactly the kind of thing Tufts was there to catch, and has become so adept at in his projects with many of the world’s leading outdoor brands, as well as his own projects.

Enroute to Mongolia, Tufts and long-time adventure partner Cody Cirillo missed their connection at Istanbul Airport, a delayed inbound flight from Denver eating up the vanishing time they had. They made the gate in seconds with the bare essentials; their ski bags remained in Istanbul as their flight left for Ulaanbataar.

It was an incredible moment for the production team back home in Verbier to get the important text: their skis were making good headway on a separate camel convoy, following the full approach two days behind the crew.

It was a sight for the team to see them eventually arrive at basecamp in one piece. "Baggage service in Mongolia," Tufts says. "Pretty bizarre. But it was perfect."

With all of these moments captured beyond the final production film cut, it makes sense to wonder what Tufts wants someone to feel when they first see one of his images, before they've read a word, and he doesn't say moved, or inspired. He says he wants them to stutter. To look at something and think: wait, that doesn't quite make sense.

"Why are there skis here? That moment of confusion, that's what makes you lean into the story."

He talks about Kerry Medig, a BC photographer whose work he's followed for years, and the idea of building a genuine paradox into the frame. Never, ever as a gimmick, rather something earned. A camel with skis in a warm country reads like a prop. A camel with skis in the Mongolian Altai is the only way those skis were getting to basecamp, and once you know that, you see the image completely differently; contrast without construction. That's the version Tufts heads out to try and get.

He makes it clear that he doesn't go out looking for a cover shot. He doesn't sketch out what he wants to make before a trip. The photograph has to come from the experience, and that means you have to actually be in it; appreciate the grit, and as he’s become known for in his circle - a Type II ‘suffer king’ who believes in trusting the process.

"First you show up," he says. "Then you see what happens."

Watch the featured film 150 Hours From Home.