It’s a magical realm to me. Just the words Hindukush, Pamir, Karakoram, Tian Shan… this, to me, sounds like poetry. Pouring over maps from that region, my mind starts racing. There, on the edge of the Himalayan world, that part of the world has kept me obsessed for 26 years now, and counting.
It really all started when I walked from Pakistan into the Wakhan corridor in Afghanistan. The borders were porous then, the year was 2000. Reaching the 5000m Irshad pass, one foot in Afghanistan, the other in Pakistan, there was an absurd sense of freedom. I have been chasing that feeling since.
The Wakhan Corridor is a narrow strip of land that was conceived and drawn by faraway imperialists sitting in Moscow and London at the end of the 19th century to separate Tsarist Russia from the British Empire. To them, this region was a wasteland. Yet, it was and still is populated by Wakhi people in the lower valleys and a small semi-nomadic community of Afghan Kyrgyz in the high altitude plateaus.
To me, it’s always been an incredible land of light and beauty. But why do I keep returning to this geographical anomaly?
I think it begins with how it changes me, every time. I use to be shy. I use to judge people on their looks a bit too fast. These places, they are here to shatter any preconceived ideas that you might have. And the tool to shatter is the love and hospitality that is given to you, abundantly.… Yet these preconceived ideas, they slowly come back, brought by the dismay of the world, piling up like dust on a mirror. You need this love again, to wipe it off. And so you return.
Something else plays out when I am there… it is the pace of travel! Most of the Wakhan moves at walking speed, and somehow that tempo matches something restless and unresolved in me. Fast places make me anxious. I have seen the light best when walking. Most of my heroes go on foot: the shepherds, the pilgrims, the foragers… You arrive gradually, and walking into these mountains reshapes your perception, your inner chemistry.
The body adjusts first to altitude and to the cold… then the repetition levels the mind. When you arrive and you face that welcoming love and hospitality, you have been physically humbled, tired, equalled.
Stepping outside, the mountains feel like a presence, keeping an eye on us mere mortals. They have explained me many things on those 30 or 40 expeditions across these mountains… They whisper gentle lessons. They are like big books of stones, holding spirits older than ourselves.
Here in the Wakhan, what you will get in abundance is good, honest hardship. Cold, wind, isolation, smoked up mud houses… It was when I crossed Mongolia on foot in 1998 that I first realised the strangest thing: that the hardship from these travels would eventually be converted into some meaningful memories. What sticks is not the struggle but it’s those countless gestures and whispers: a bowl of salty milk tea under theatrical light, a hand adjusting a veil against the wind. Indoor, these intimate settings hold moments of such fragile beauty. A gaze too long can affect the picture I am desperate to take. I like walking on these eggshells.
Outside, dwarfed on the trail, the massiveness of these mountains will excite your imagination. I feel the agitation best under the influence of high altitude, at the end of a long days carrying a heavy pack, on the way to a high pasture. I mean… of course fairies! Of course supernatural beings created out of smokeless fire, of feared Birgooch, this creature with a hole instead of a stomach…
At the edge of the high pasture, as you approach a shrine of stones crowned with horns and trees draped in colourful cloths, you can sense the layers of belief that have passed through this part of the world. If you know how to look, they are all still there: the echoes of nature worship, the fires of Zoroastrianism, the quiet devotion of Buddhism… and, more recently, Islam.
Language eventually played a crucial role in my falling deeper in love. I didn’t “learn” Wakhi, it just happened over time, on these long journeys. And speaking the language slowly changed everything. Laughter appeared, lots of it. Language creates proximity, and it’s a key to easily shake off the possible misunderstandings. I have a camera… but mostly I am responding, answering, being answered. Of course there is still an inevitable cultural divide, but the language help me build bridges, it makes my heart beat. And ultimately it makes me a better photographer.
That “job” of a photographer, it’s something that you also need to return to, with excitement. Where is the driving force beyond simply “telling the story”? Well, maybe many of us photographers want to create beautiful pictures because if you make something beautiful then maybe you are a bit beautiful too, right? And for that feeling of being beautiful you dig deeper, it’s a good driving force. That digging might lead you to explore different photographic languages. You might even dare to try and write poetry with that photographic language. You forget about grammar, you play with the edges of composition. Success, failures. You pull that thread to see what comes out…
And if the connection to your place of obsession is right - and honest - you will return obsessively because it has also become your place of poetry. And for me it is these mountains and the people that dwell within them.
And so it has been 3 decades of returning. I return because I know I will be impressed, intrigued by what I see - that the heart will beat. I also know that I will find that bridge, this dance of mutual recognition, this vibration between worlds that honour differences. Each visit becomes a dialogue, a mirror in which I am changed simply by being seen, and the place is changed by my presence. I see you… you see me.
And so this relationship can’t stop… not for me I think. And ultimately, in these intimate moments, it is love, simply love that calls me back again and again and I am just an addict for it.
