Captures in the Land of Khan

Joshua MacLeod documents the beauty of the rugged Mongolian people with the Tamron SP 17-50mm lens.

Article By Jennifer Gidman

Images by Joshua MacLeod

In the past five years alone, MacLeod has ventured to Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Ghana, Malawi, South Africa, Indonesia, India, Azerbaijan, Japan, and Mexico, where he’s been able to capture intimate portraits of local residents that are often hard to obtain by typical tourists. “As a photographer, my goal is to show the beauty of humanity and the beauty of people,” he says. “What happens a lot of times with these mission groups is that it becomes about the numbers: ‘We served 10,000 people with x amount of this and that.’ With a photograph, though, you’re able to really show someone’s heart and who he or she is as a person.”

For his latest two-and-a-half-week trip to Outer Mongolia, the world’s second-largest landlocked country, MacLeod brought along his Tamron SP 17-50mm lens to showcase the native residents and highlight their lifestyle in an often harsh climate and unforgiving landscape. “The 17-50 is one of my favorite lenses,” says MacLeod. “It’s light and it’s extremely portable. For portraiture, the 17mm focal length is wide enough to tell the story about the environment of where someone is, but that 50mm length is close enough to where you can get some good depth of field and achieve a nice portrait.”

The 17-50’s f/2.8 maximum aperture proved ideal for MacLeod in a variety of situations where he found himself in remote locales with less-than-optimal lighting. “There was hardly a situation over there where there wasn’t low light,” he explains. “For instance, I visited villages where the nomadic people live in tents called gers, and while I was sitting inside these gers, I would be able to get really great shots with a low ISO. For me, if I bump the ISO above 800, it gets too grainy — so having that 2.8 is a necessity in a place like this.”

More Than a Tourist

To capture compelling photos, MacLeod subscribes to two tenets. “First, you have to work with individuals who are truly serving other people,” he explains. “On my own, I’m not really going to understand the culture enough to interact with the people. You need to have someone who’s there on a regular basis, who speaks the language, and who’s genuinely liked by the community you’re photographing.”

Second, according to MacLeod, is having a genuine love for your subjects. “It’s about more than just getting a great shot,” he says. “For me, the motivation is to really love the person I’m taking a picture of — and they pick up on that. If the motivation was for me to get an award-winning picture, they’d pick up on that, too. When you truly love the people in front of your camera, their guard comes down, and you’re able to capture them in their element.”

MacLeod employs strict rules about taking portraits in the overseas arena. “We never take pictures without first asking permission, and you can’t really ask permission until you have some kind of relationship with the person,” he says. “It does make for a slower process, because you’re not able to simply run up and start snapping pictures. A lot of times there’s also a language barrier, and because you don’t speak the language, how are you going to ask permission to take pictures? But you can do it — a lot of it is being able to show people the pictures you’re taking.”

To expedite this relationship-building process, MacLeod now carries around a portable dye-sub printer. “I give a print to anyone I’m taking a picture of,” he says. “It costs about 30 cents a picture. Let’s say there’s a lady I really want to take a picture of with a lot of character, but she seems reluctant. Maybe a kid, though, will beg me to take a picture. I’ll take the shot, then give him a print from my portable printer. Once that lady sees the picture printed out, suddenly she wants you to take her picture, too.”

MacLeod’s image of a grandmother and toddler relaxing on a bed outside a ger was one example of what he deemed “a real relationship-building shot,” where he had to earn the elder woman’s trust before he could capture what was one of his favorite shots of the trip. “It also shows the relationship between young and old,” he says. “I shot that at 1/30th of a second, f/5.6, ISO 400.”

In the end, though, you may simply have to respect if someone doesn’t want their picture taken or, even after the picture is taken, kept. “Some of the best pictures I took over there had to stay there in the field,” MacLeod laments. “Even after you’ve gotten their permission to take a picture, they may see the image and say they don’t want you to use it, so you have to delete it. That’s hard to do when you’ve gotten a really nice shot.”

Off the Beaten Path

It was in the remotest of villages and landscapes where MacLeod often found his best images. “One morning I got up at 4am to go photograph in a local ger district,” he says. “There are these dogs all over the place — you have to crouch down to act like you’re going to throw a rock at them, because they’ll come right up to you and bite you. I hiked up on this mountain to take some pictures, and on the way back, I got lost — for an hour, I was completely lost in Outer Mongolia!”

After finding a resident with a cell phone, MacLeod managed to call the missionary he was staying with, describe where he was, and find his way back to the nearest village. He was walking past a ger at around 8am when he saw a little girl standing outside of it with her father. “I knew I had to get a picture of her,” he says. “I pointed and gave the signal of shaking my camera so the father would know I wanted a picture. The dad gave the ‘one minute’ sign, took the girl, and disappeared back inside. When he came back outside with her, she had a whole new pink dress on and a hat. I took a picture of her standing right in the doorway of the ger. It had been such an exhausting day, between getting away from those crazy dogs and getting lost, and I had almost given up hope of getting any great pictures; this image was the final result of that adventure.” MacLeod nabbed the shot at f/4.5, 1/200th of a second, at ISO 400.

MacLeod also discovered that, to get the shots you’re looking for, you sometimes have to engage in unusual local customs. “I stopped by the house of a local cowboy and was invited into his house as a guest,” says MacLeod. “As part of this honor, he gave me candy and vodka and asked me to drink fermented horse milk with him. In the times of Genghis Khan, the warriors rode out on two horses: If one horse died, they’d use the other one. They would milk the horses and make cheeses so they didn’t have to go back and get food. I think part of the reason that the Mongolians were so strong is because they drank this stuff. If you take a bag of Sour Patch Kids, leave it out in the sun for a couple of weeks, and add bugs and dirt to it — that’s pretty much what it tastes like.”

Drinking the milk, though, established a comfort level with the cowboy’s family that allowed MacLeod to get an intimate shot of the patriarch. “I was making friends with his kids, reading a book to them — or rather, making gestures, since I didn’t speak Mongolian, and they didn’t speak English,” he says. “While that was going on, the guy went into a back room and put his traditional green outfit on. It was 3pm, and all natural light was coming in through a window he was sitting directly across from — that light streaming in created a nice vignette. I shot him at 32mm, f/3.5, ISO 400, at 1/30th of a second, set to auto white balance.”

Even the indigenous beasts that roam the Mongolian countryside found themselves in front of MacLeod’s camera. “There were these nomadic Mongolians in the countryside raising cattle,” he says. “We drove for a couple of days to get to this location, and we saw the cattle and these magnificent horses. Mongolian horses are just beautiful — they’re among the strongest and most rigorous horses in the world.”

Standing about 10 feet away, with the 17-50mm lens out to 42mm at f/2.8, MacLeod captured one horse as he sauntered with the cattle herders. “It’s sometimes hard to take a picture of a horse — if they’re just sitting there, it can be kind of boring,” he says. “But there was something about this shot. It doesn’t obey any of the rules of thirds or other standard compositional rules, but I think it works because it highlights the horse’s mane, and the sky is so beautiful in the background.”

Perhaps the greatest impact on MacLeod during his trip to Mongolia was something that couldn’t be filtered or fixed in post-processing. “This is the harshest climate you can possibly imagine,” he says. “It’s 40 degrees below zero, and these people live in tents! I had this window where I was able to document the beauty of a people who live in such tremendous hardship. I was also affected seeing the missionaries I went and visited, and how they suffered in order to serve the people there.”

MacLeod has no regrets about leaving a more lucrative lifestyle in corporate American behind. “We’re about to launch a fundraising campaign called Media Change, where our goal is to get 10,000 people to give $10 a month to fund media to serve poverty,” he says. “That gives us $100,000 a month to put into doing documentaries about sex trafficking, AIDS, and food programs, for example. Looking back at this year, just through our campaign for the Persecution Project Foundation alone, there are now 50,000 people who were dying of thirst now drinking clean water thanks to our photos and videos. I can look back and say, ‘This was the right choice.’”

For more information about MacLeod’s work with Watermelon Ministries, go to seedplanted.org.