MONGOLIA: Land of the Deer Stone

Photographs by Elaine Ling

“Standing in the Gobi Desert with the flat horizon all around me and space as far as the eye could see, the most interesting challenge was simply determining where best to place the horizon on the ground class of my view camera.  I first travelled to Mongolia in 2002 because I wanted to photograph the Gobi Desert. I have since returned four times.  This harsh yet beautiful land, whose nomadic peoples are struggling to maintain their traditional culture, has proved to be a very rich subject for my photography.” - Elaine Ling

“With her photographs, Elaine Ling has taken us around the world to some of the most exquisite examples of those marks left behind many years ago. Using light to capture stone, Ling reminds us that we are all rooted inexorably to this third rock from the sun. This is at once an ancient and timeliness preoccupation that touches all civilizations.”  - Ed Burtynsky.

From 2002 to 2008, Elaine Ling made five trips to Mongolia’s Gobi Desert to find and photograph the Deer Stones, Turkic Stones and Ovoos that are scattered across Mongolia’s desert vastness.  In Mongolia: Land of the Deer Stone, her photographs and writing about the land and the nomads who live there, tell the story of a desert world where shamans still converse with spirits and where ancient forms of Buddhism are enjoying a resurgence after years of Soviet suppression.  Mongolia is truly a land of mystery and magic.

Elaine Ling is an adventurer, traveler, and photographer who is most at home backpacking her view camera across the great deserts of the world and sleeping under the stars. Ling’s photographs, widely exhibited and published, are in the permanent collections of numerous museum and private collections including the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France; Fotografie Forum International, Frankfurt, Germany; Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark; Centro Português de Fotografia, Porto, Portugal; Scavi Scaligeri International Centre of Photography, Verona, Italy; Musée de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium; Fototeca de Cuba, Havana; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada; the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. Her international publications include work in View Camera, Photo Technique International, The Polaroid Book, Italian Zoom Magazine, and Aperture.  This is her first book.