On the publication of Luke Oppenheimer’s photobook, we share a short preview. To purchase ‘Ottuk,’ visit Aliens in Residence.
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There is a common expression in Kyrgyzstan: “It only takes one frost.” The implied second half of the saying is, “to lose everything.” In the Tien Shan mountains, the temperatures can swiftly drop to –35° Celsius. If the sheep are out overnight, they will all die. An entire family’s livelihood can be lost. A snow-packed valley littered with frozen sheep, still upright like thousands of stone statuettes, is a common sight and one that embodies the precarious existence of village life. Injuries, illnesses and blood feuds can change the course of a family’s history. The elements that carve away at the rocks, likewise chisel into the souls of the shepherds. What is left are the essentials of the human spirit. There is no pageantry or superfluous emotions; only principles and millennia-old dogma shaped by necessity and hard-won experience remain. Hospitality to strangers, filial piety, loyalty till death and the immense value of a person’s word form the substance of their inner domains and dictate their conduct. This is the world of Ottuk, tucked away in a valley, surrounded by mountains, steeped in legend and unravaged by time.
In the winter of 2020, Luke Oppenheimer travelled to the Tien Shan mountains of Central Kyrgyzstan for one month to cover a story about Ottuk, a small village of shepherds suffering from severe predation on livestock by a growing population of wolves. Every year, wolves eat up to one hundred horses and countless sheep from the village. In the frigid winter months, the men of the village venture into the surrounding mountains to hunt the wolves and mitigate their losses. What started out as a month-long trip turned into a five-year-long project about the people of Ottuk as he came to be accepted as a member of the village and adopted by one of the families. His body of work, “Ottuk” is a deep dive into the dreams, hardships, joys and sorrows of the villagers, their ancient way of life and the landscape that shaped them.
