Sophie Howarth is a Sydney-based photographer who visited and fell in love with Mongolia after being tipped-off by a fellow photographer about the local throat-singing traditions. When photographing the country’s famed Golden Eagle Festival—in which participants hunt for small game on horseback using eagles to ensnare prey—Howarth experienced a physical sense of place similar to that of the Australian interior. She also had a chance encounter with the special subject of a documentary entitled The Eagle Huntress: 12-year-old Golden Eagle contestant Aisholpan. We chatted at Melbourne’s Lido Cinemas during a showing of her exhibition Soaring, a series of works that captures human experiences set against the vast landscapes of Mongolia.

What first drew you to Mongolia?

I first went there because of a photographer Thomas I met in Nepal. He asked, “Sophie you’ve never been to Mongolia!” When someone says that, you feel like you’ve missed out on something massive. I didn’t even know where Mongolia was.

The reason I met him is because I was researching Indian music. He told me that Mongolia was one of those places I must go because of the throat singing.

I then flew back from Nepal thinking about Mongolia. In my head I was thinking, I’ve got to get there somehow.

So it was lingering in the back of your mind. Did it take you a while to finally get to Mongolia?

Not at all. When I was on my way back to Australia I bought the Lonely Planet book for Mongolia at Singapore airport to read on the way home. When I got home, I started researching, wondering how I would go about this. I contacted Thomas and asked. He was actually working out of Mongolia at the time, running a National Geographic camp, so I asked if he needed an assistant. I was going to be a general dog’s body around camp.

He introduced me as a beginner photography teacher to the group, which was new to me. My background is in music photography. I used to photograph Big Day Out. During that time in my life, all I did was festivals. He introduced me as a crack photographer, like I photographed The Rolling Stones, but I actually just photographed for Rolling Stone. The next day I had to teach all these people photography.

How do you approach photography? Do you just see something visually captivating and go with it? Or do you have a theme in mind?

I specialise in festival photography and I love that environment. For me, it’s all in the moments. When you drop yourself into that environment for ten to fifteen hours, you’re sort of in photographer’s heaven.

In relation to approaching the subject matter, what I’ve discovered is that you have to be absolutely present for a photograph to be powerful. At a festival, you’re there swimming around in it and everything else has to disappear. You can’t think about anything else.

So you have to get into this meditative state? Do you think the environment in Mongolia helped to facilitate that?

I think that’s just festivals. I call it a vortex. You arrive at a festival and the ordinary drops away and the chance for the extraordinary can appear because no one there is thinking about what they have to do day-to-day. It’s a real otherworldliness.

The reason I was fascinated by the Golden Eagle Festival was because when I stepped onto that festival ground for the first time, it all felt so familiar. I’d never seen eagle hunters before in my life; this was so foreign to me, but felt so familiar. I think it’s that universal festival experience. Everyone has it when they’re forced into that vortex—where there’s the performer up on stage, and then the audience—something magical happens between them.

How does that relate to the Golden Eagle Festival? So you’ve got the audience or community that’s watching the spectacle unfold? Or is everyone participating?

The first one that I went to was a more structured environment. There was a roped off area—you weren’t to go on the playing field, you were the spectator on the outside. But then I went to another one where you’re all in it together. It felt like you were swirling around, because where they have the horses running—and it was a bit of a parade—the hunters and the eagles were showing off what they could do.

At the smaller festivals everyone grabs everyone. You don’t know where the horses were going to gallop off to. They’re all thinking what’s going to happen? Right at the end of one of the smaller festivals, my friend said, “Oh,” and this bus arrived, and he said, “Now we’re going to have some music.” So out of this bus came this amazingly dressed Kazakh woman. Then she got on the dombra* and was playing all these traditional Kazakh songs with everyone gathered around. No one knew when they were coming. They’d driven for a week from the border of Mongolia and China—from another Kazakh community—and were late because the bus had broken down, so they arrived right at the end of the festival.

*a long-necked stringed instrument

Is there a similarity between the Mongolian and Australian landscapes?

When I was there in that landscape, it felt so expansive. It’s such a rich nothingness. I remember the first time I went to inner Australia I couldn’t believe there was so much life in this space. So when I went to Mongolia, it did feel familiar, but I couldn’t name what it was.

Funnily, I had a job I had to do in Alice Springs six months after I came back from a visit to Mongolia. I stepped off the plane and said, “Oh my god—it’s here.” The air; the spaciousness was so full.

The first time I went to Mongolia, I remember sitting on the bus going out to the [National Geographic] camp thinking, I don’t get it. Looking out the window I was thinking that it was so brown. I thought my connection to the landscape was never going to come, because visually, when you land at UB [Ulaanbaatar] there’s this Soviet concrete everywhere.

It did happen, of course. This American girl, who was working at Thomas’s camp, was driving us and it was like ten seasons in one day. It was cloudy and cold, then it was hot, then it was hailing. We got to the camp, then this massive rain storm passed. I remember it being lush green with the beautiful rivers.

Then I stayed. I was only supposed to be there for two weeks on my first trip; I ended staying for two months.

When did you first make contact with the eagle huntress Aisholpan and start taking photos of her?

My experience with her has been through the festival. When I first went to the Golden Eagle Festival she was in the competition. The documentary film crew was there. She was very much wrapped-up making the doco.

The next time I encountered her, I went to her house and had tea with her family. I want her to be quite a big part of this book I’m putting together. On this trip, I specifically wanted to collect portraits of eagle hunters, so to photograph her is interesting, because a lot of the men don’t believe that she’s the real deal. The Mongols are quite matriarchal whereas Kazakhs are quite patriarchal. In the documentary they actually say that it’s not possible she’s an eagle hunter because she’s a girl. Though it’s hard to fully understand all the subtleties of the language because some of it gets lost in translation.

It’s interesting to be talking about the connection between person and country going back to Australia—having that spiritual connection. When I’m in Mongolia, I just hear the wind and it is like the middle of Australia. They have that real reverence for the elements and they have to respect it. It’s that question: Why would you treat it any other way? Living in a city can dislocate you from the earth. They don’t have to reconnect with nature because they’ve never left it.

The Eagle Huntress by Otto Bell, 2016, 87 mins. A Sony Pictures Classics film.

Sophie Howarth’s Soaring exhibition can be seen at Lido Cinemas Hawthorn in Victoria, Australia, until Friday 24 March 2017.

The Eagle Huntress documentary about a teenage girl competing at Mongolia’s Golden Eagle Festival is now screening at independent cinemas around Australia throughout March and at select cinemas and festivals worldwide throughout the year.