Turning the Lens on Mongolia

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Photographer Matthieu Paley has made a career of photographing places far afield from his home in Portugal and his native France, often focusing on communities facing geopolitical tensions or struggling against pollution or environmental issues. In July, he traveled to Mongolia on the heels of a major announcement: In 2024, the country of Mongolia, alongside The Nature Conservancy and the Mongolian Nature’s Legacy Foundation announced a nearly $200-million deal to extend conservation in the land-locked nation over the next 15 years. The deal was made under the framework of Enduring Earth, an international conservation collaboration formed in 2021.

Paley photographed the country’s vast landscapes and the people working to protect them for an article in Nature Conservancy magazine. This was far from his first time in Mongolia. “In my early 20s, I set out to cross Mongolia,” he says. “I left for three months with my then-girlfriend and about 70 rolls of film in my backpack.” (The trip went well by the way. They’re now married.) Since then, he’s returned several times.

In 2025, for nearly two weeks, he traveled around Ulaanbaatar, the country’s capital, and across multiple western provinces. Joined by Mongolian photographer Sunderiya Erdenesaikhan, or Sonia, he captured images of the country’s steep mountains, vast blue lakes and temperate grasslands—part of one of the last major intact grasslands on Earth.

In some ways, the country had changed significantly since his first trip in the 1990s. But in others it felt quite familiar, he says. Along the way, he sought out moments that showed those changes or revealed a bit of the personality and culture of the people who call Mongolia home.

“I can’t just take pretty pictures,” he says. “I just get visually bored. I want to find what this weirdness is. It’s what drives me. I look for it constantly.”

A statue of a wold and a deer with lights in the background. — Paley first traveled to Mongolia in the 1990s. At the time the country was in its first years of transitioning to an independent democratic country. Returning more than 25 years later, Paley says, much has changed—from the traffic to language use to food. “I’m really interested in that change and how it can be expressed in a picture,” he says. “That’s where my mind goes sometimes when I see wildly modern things in contrast with this age-old nomadic culture.” Across the countryside, he found elements of the old Soviet Mongolia, like these statues at a park in a western province. © Matthieu Paley

A herder standing atop a large pile of freshly shorn wool. — Nomadic herding remains a way of life for about a quarter of Mongolians today, and the country’s connection to the global wool trade has driven up livestock numbers in recent decades—something that has contributed to grassland overgrazing. Paley looked for ways to show this economic-environmental connection, and this picture of a man atop of a truck piled high with wool was one of his favorites. Herders from the area were bringing wool to this truck in western Mongolia, which would carry it to a nearby town to be made into carpets. © Matthieu Paley

A herd of Przewalski horses graze in front of boulders. — Despite its many economic and cultural shifts, Mongolia’s connection to conservation goes back many generations. In fact, one of the oldest land protection areas on Earth, Bodg Khan Uul Biosphere Reserve, is located near Ulaanbaatar. Today, another park near the capital—called Hustai National Park—is famous for the Przewalski horse, the only non-domesticated horse on Earth. Paley visited the park and joined a ranger as they watched the small wild horses wander the park’s hillsides. The park protects many rare animals and has played a key role in re-introducing species to other protected areas in Mongolia. © Matthieu Paley

A man sitting in the driver's seat of a car while a horse pokes it's head through from the back. — Traveling from one area in Mongolia to another can take days: The roads are sometimes rough and the distances incredibly vast. Days were often long—Paley rose early to capture the sunrise—and the drives sometimes involved the unexpected. At one point, Paley got out of the car, turned around and a horse had stepped into the van, ready to be transported to a new location. For Paley, the quirks were all part of the journey. “Once you decide to have a laugh about it, it’s all great,” he says. “If you get frustrated, you’re in trouble.” © Matthieu Paley

A wide view of grassy Mongolian foothills. — In some areas, Sonia and Paley used drone photography to convey the scale of the mountains and grasslands they encountered. “Mongolia is so flat at times, a drone right away gives a sense of place,” Paley says. In other cases, as seen here in the Govi-Altai Province of western Mongolia, green rolling mountains almost dwarf the grasslands. To capture spaces from a human perspective, Paley would sometimes ask their driver Bilegdemberel Yampil to drop him off about 15 minutes away from their day’s destination. Then, Paley would walk, arriving on foot and able to photograph a location as a person arriving on foot would. © Matthieu Paley

The front end of a motorbike, with the rear tire missing. — Paley has photographed Mongolia several times since the 1990s alongside many mountainous areas of Asia. These days, it’s not the destination that typically excites him but rather a particular photographic format: medium format. “I would literally get up, like I couldn’t sleep, because I wanted to see how it looks,” he says. “Medium format really made me love [photography] again.” The format, which he used on this assignment, allows photographers to capture more pixels in an image than a typical 35mm film size, allowing for greater tonal range and more depth in small moments like this half-broken dirt bike he came upon in the Govi-Altai Province. © Matthieu Paley

Two photographs side by side. The first shows a Mongolian woman drawing an arrow. The second shows the same woman being photographed, with the photographer in the image. — As Paley photographed Mongolia, Sonia photographed Paley, capturing behind-the-scenes images of how the photography process worked. In this case, he captured 13-year-old Gegeenee Byambasuren practicing her archery in Khovsgol Province. The key to portraits is to “not control too much,” Paley says. “When I say, we’re done and people start moving, then I take more pictures because often it breaks that staged position.” Sonia also captured Paley trying out his subjects’ activities at times. He practiced archery after capturing this portrait, and at another point, he joined kids biking around a park in Ulaanbaatar.

A man in a hat and sunglasses leaning against the statue of a large ram. — Mongolia is sometimes called the land of eternal sunshine because of its numerous sunny days—not ideal lighting in many photographer’s eyes. Paley disagrees. “Every time is good to photograph,” he says. You just have to learn to work with the sunshine. Sometimes that meant rising early in the day to avoid the high sun, sometimes it meant adjusting a camera’s technical settings or tweaking an image’s white balance. It allowed him to embrace the bright colors of Mongolia—and sometimes of his subject’s shirts as in this portrait of a local in Govi-Altai province. © Matthieu Paley

Two men and a woman smiling into the camera for a selfie. — The trip ultimately involved traveling hundreds of miles with photographer Sonia and drive Bilegdemberel Yampil (all seen here on one of their drives). In some ways, Paley says, his many experiences in Mongolia—especially on his first trip early—shaped his career. “Mongolia put a huge dent in my understanding of behavior, politeness, the way you move, the way you eat, the way you sit, the way you everything,” he says. It gave him perspective on his culture and upbringing and shaped how he approaches others both in Mongolia and at home—but also on his many assignments in the western Himalayas. “I love that, having my brain cracked and rethinking my own culture,” he says. © Matthieu Paley

A version of this article ran in Issue 4, 2025, of Nature Conservancy magazine. See more of Paley’s photography and read about the Eternal Mongolia conservation commitment in the latest issue of Nature Conservancy magazine.

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