I’m going to describe how I set about making my first photo exhibition.  It starts with an idea hanging from the title ‘Childhood and Folklore’, which comes from an ordeal (experience) in Mongolia. You can read more about it in the Almas Interviews over to the right of this site in the box below ‘stories’.

Two years ago I was in Mongolia with a couple of  friends. Relationships went from good to bad to good again and then…as they do, changed again. As is often the case with circumstances like these, something unique was born -  The almas.

We went to Mongolia with the aim of producing a film. We had never made a film before, but we’d been around the world travelling to remote places and documenting for a while and we had enough contacts to make a go of it.  We figured all you needed was a good eye and some heart. With that we threw $10 000 into the pot and bought a sony HD camera with a handle on top, a couple of mics and ten tapes. threw in some still cameras and a pile of notebooks and caught the underground out of Seoul, South Korea to the port of Incheon.

Twenty four hours later the boat arrived in Tianjin , China. A huge port with colossal cranes and other dockside apparatus. The rope that they winched down was as thick as a tree and men in white uniforms like something out of a sixties James Bond film scurried around organising the harbouring.   From tianjin we took a bus to Beijing and the next day caught a sleeper to Inner Mongolia. We crossed the Great Wall by night. I looked out at it from the window by the bed in the back of the bus.  The stars were shining above China that night.

By midnight we were in a wild outpost of a town. The bus had stopped to refuel in a seemingly endless dust blown darkness. Men lolled drunkenly at the tables. I smoked a cigarette, looked up at a sky as starry as ever I had seen, then got back in the bus for the final twelve hours to the border of Outer Mongolia – Zamyn Uud -  ‘Road’s Door.’