Mongolia Photo Tour 2026 Report

For years I had wanted to photograph Mongolia the way I actually like to work: small, slow, and close enough to be offered tea. So we kept the group to four. Four photographers, a modern air-conditioned minivan all for us , a window seat for everybody, and twelve days in July 2026  to cross a country that keeps its two great loves — the golden eagle and the horse — the better part of a thousand kilometres apart.

We landed in Ulaanbaatar, the Crowded, Traffic-Jammed Red City, and went straight out to walk it. It is a marvellously incoherent place: glass towers standing over the drab, uniform row houses the Soviet decades left behind, a wedding party spilling out of a courtyard, an old man in a deel (the long belted Mongolian coat) waiting for a bus in his very good boots. We photographed loosely and without a plan, which in my experience is exactly when a city hands you something. Later we went to the Chojin Lama temple, a low sprawl of painted timber and carved eaves that Stalin’s administration closed in the late 1930s and turned into a museum — which, grimly enough, is the reason it is still standing at all. Two models joined us there in traditional dress and we worked the courtyards until the light went. A gentle first day. Deliberately so.

The countryside began the next morning. We drove out to Elsentasarkhai, a strange and lovely hinge of a place where mountain steppe, green meadow and sand dune all meet within sight of one another, and had lunch at a ger camp before going on to a camel-herding family. Bactrians, the two-humped kind, some of them very pale — the famous white camels — standing about in that superior way camels have, entirely unbothered by four people crawling around them for a better angle. The herders put on a show for us and then, much more usefully, simply let us stay while they worked. We went on to Kharkhorin in the late afternoon and watched a performance in the evening, dust still in everything we owned.

This is why we come in July. The Naadam of Ulaanbaatar takes place largely inside a stadium and is, for a photographer, mostly a study in other photographers’ backs. So we do not go. Instead we take the rural Naadam at Kharkhorin, in the wide valley on the banks of the Orkhon, where the whole thing happens on open grass and nobody minds where you stand.

We arrived for the opening ceremony and stayed for everything: the wrestlers in their zodog and shuudag, circling, gripping, and then — my personal favourite detail of the entire trip — performing the devekh, the eagle dance, arms out and wheeling, before and after every bout. Six hundred kilometres from the Altai and there was the bird again. The horse races are run by children, some of them no older than eight, over cross-country distances that would give a European insurance broker a heart attack; they come over the last rise in a line, filthy, shouting, absolutely fearless. ‘Hold tight, little one!’ Then the archers, in silk, loosing at the small stacked leather cylinders on the ground while the judges sing the score.

Archers Competition Mongolia Photo Tour

Because it is a small town, we also had the run of the school and the official buildings, and because it is Mongolia we were fed continuously — huushuur, the fried meat pastry that exists at Naadam and, as far as I can tell, nowhere else with quite the same conviction. We photographed the milling about afterwards too, which is often the best of it: medals being shown off, horses being admired, whole families in their finest silks standing in the grass at six in the evening.

We were up early on the second Naadam morning for Erdene Zuu, the monastery on the edge of town — over four hundred years old, ringed by its wall of white stupas, and built quite literally out of the ruins of Karakorum, the imperial capital that once stood on this spot. Its name means Hundred Treasures. It has rather more than that. We were allowed into an active temple hall where the monks were chanting, the incense lying in flat blue layers across the shafts of window light, and I put the camera down for a minute or two, which I do not often do.

Then back to the festival ground for the closing events, and the ceremony that ends it, and the long slow drift home across the valley.

HORSES, AND A SHAMAN

Our last full day in the countryside was spent with a nomad family and their herds, and it gave us the sequence I suspect most of the group will remember longest: the breaking of a young gelding. It is not gentle and it is not cruel; it is a negotiation, conducted at speed, between one very determined man and one extremely unconvinced horse, with the rest of the family calling advice from the sidelines. We shot it from the dust with wide lenses and got up grinning.

Then portraits — the grandmother at the stove, the boy who could already ride better than I will ever drive — and in the morning the road back to Ulaanbaatar, arriving by lunch. Our final session was a private one with a shaman: the drum, the heavy fringed headdress that hides the face entirely, the shift in the room when it begins. Whatever you believe, something happens to the air. We photographed quietly and asked permission for everything.

The next day we went to the airport.