Mongolia.

Photographs and essay by Marco van Duyvendijk.

Artimo, Amsterdam, 2006. 96 pp., 72 color illustrations, 8¾x12".

Marco van Duyvendijk was born in the Netherlands in 1974. He studied psychology in college and has applied his training to his work as a self-taught photographer and a striking portraitist. Over the past few years, he has concentrated on life in Central and Eastern Europe, but at the request of the Mongolian Consulate he recently spent a winter and a summer in Mongolia. This book is the result. Its 72 color prints present daily life in a society where a teenager might just as easily live like a nomad on the steppe as like punk in the city. The images are both pretty (in the way of faded retro fabrics and pink cheeks) and beautiful (in the way of high cheekbones and high altitude). Their subjects include child contortionists, young monks in saffron robes, school girls in ruffled pinafores, coal miners, horse racers and a vendor selling sunglasses in an open field.
A young girl sits on a bed, quietly reading a book. Her head is bent in concentration, elbows tucked in at the waist, hair pulled back into a ponytail, small feet planted sedately on the linoleum floor. Her slight form occupies just a fraction of the space of this photograph, which is otherwise filled with drying laundry, a red hanger, a soup canteen and the sort of sundry artifacts of everyday life that indicate she is not in Europe or America. This scene of quaint domesticity seems like a rather ordinary cover image for a book so grandly titled Mongolia. In fact, this unassuming image perfectly introduces Marco van Duyvendijk's approach of using the subtleties and details of everyday existence to create a portrait of the country's people.

The majority of the 72 color photographs in Mongolia are an amalgam of portraits set against a backdrop indicative of each subject's personal and public lives. Van Duyvendijk includes irreverent tattooed teenagers, monks in crimson and saffron, and even a young nomad cheerfully taking an axe to the intestines of a horse. Anchoring his subjects in time and place, van Duyvendijk also photographs factories, mines, abandoned Soviet military bases and a nomad's yurt in a city suburb.

Mongolia is not the stereotypical stuff of "documentary photography," which seems limited to black-and-white images of the desolate steppes of Mongolia, weatherworn faces of nomads and the bewildered stares of their young children. Van Duyvendijk refuses to depict Mongolia as a time capsule of untarnished traditions or a society hopelessly inculcated by Western culture. He shows us a country that is neither, photographing the strange aesthetic appeal of traditional fabrics juxtaposed with the garish colors of a pink checkered sheet imported from China or a young nomad in jeans and sneakers holding the reins of his pony. HANNAH NEWBURN

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