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In the remote village of Ottuk, men protect their precious sheep by heading into the mountains. Luke Oppenheimer went to photograph them … and stayed for four years
‘Life is precarious’ … Nadir and his two sons Amir and Emir, Ottuk, 2021Thu 23 Apr 2026 10.18 CEST
Tien Shan Mountains, Naryn Region, Central Kyrgyzstan, January 2021
In the winter of 2021, Luke Oppenheimer travelled to the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan for a short assignment on wolves preying on livestock in Ottuk, a remote village of shepherds. Each year, wolves kill dozens of horses and countless sheep, forcing the men of the village into the surrounding mountains during the harshest months to hunt and protect their herds. What began as a short trip soon grew into a much larger story. Ottuk is published by Aliens in Residence. Quotes and photographs by Luke Oppenheimer
Nuruzbai, Tien Shan Mountains, February 2021
The month-long trip grew into a four-year project, as Oppenheimer was gradually accepted into the community and adopted by one of its families. His body of work, Ottuk, is an intimate portrait of the villagers, their ancient way of life, and the landscape that has shaped them. ‘Nuruzbai, 62, “glasses” for wolves during a 12-hour hunt. He is rarely in the village as he spends most of his time in the mountains hunting. He is known as a wild man in the village’
Ruslan, Ottuk, February 2021
There is a saying in Kyrgyzstan: ‘It only takes one frost’ – meaning that a single night can wipe out an entire family’s livelihood. In valleys littered with frozen sheep, life is precarious, shaped by the elements, injuries, illness and feuds. The villagers’ existence is stripped to essentials: hospitality, loyalty, filial duty, and the weight of one’s word. ‘Ruslan, 35, with his wife and two kids. Ruslan started hunting when he was a teen and now travels around the country shooting wolves for villages suffering from attacks. He is paid in sheep or horses’
Shepherd, Tien Shan Mountains, January 2021
In the mountains the temperatures can swiftly drop to –35C. 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. 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. Only principles and dogma shaped by necessity and experience remain
Nadir, 47, and his two sons, Amir and Emir, with a portrait of Nadir’s Grandfather. Ottuk, February, 2021
‘Nadir, my best friend in Ottuk, recently told me that his eldest son would be joining the border guards. He was 18 and would soon be married too. I imagined how his life would unfold from then on. Would he be stationed perhaps in a high traffic town on the Kazakh or Uzbek border? His wife pregnant, he’ll settle into a seated bureaucratic position in a stuffy government building with only the scars on his hands to remind him of the calluses he once had from farm work and wolf hunting’
Ruslan, 35, Ottuk, January 2021
‘Kyrgyzstan is a land of legends, shaped by mythology and experience. In fact, the two are often inseparable. The Kaiberen, a magical deer that once punished a greedy hunter by making him shoot his own son before burying them both in an avalanche, still incites caution in local hunters when choosing their prey. Members of the Bugu tribe refuse to hunt deer out of respect for their ungulate ancestry: according to legend, a mother deer saved a pair of orphans and brought them to the shores of Lake Issyk Kul where they founded their first village’
Sary-Chat Nature Reserve, Kyrgyzstan, 2023
‘These legends are innumerable and seldom written down. They were told to me on mountain passes, in jeeps crossing endless stretches of plateau, or in remote villages over cups of tea. Park rangers often live in huts such as this for months at a time with little to no human contact’
Nuruzbai, 62, Ottuk, February, 2021
Nuruzbai learned how to hunt from his father at the age of 10. His father was a renowned marksman who narrowly escaped being drafted into the sniper division in the second world war because his ability to shoot wolves at mining sites and collective farms was deemed necessary for the survival of the villages. Nuruzbai still hunts to this day
Dinner in Ruslan’s home, Ottuk, February, 2023
Kuban Jumabaev, the regional head of the Snow Leopard Foundation, recounts: ‘I can say that Kyrgyzstan is filled with myths that people really believe. Sometime in the 70s or 80s the USSR tried to see if African wild dogs would survive in one of our parks. Rumours about this spread and over time it became a story about Russian wolves being imported’
Tokush, Ottuk, February 2023
Nintety-two-year-old Tokush remembers when wolves entered her house and destroyed her home: ‘During collectivisation our family managed 40 sheep. We would smoke the wolves out, make scarecrows and sometimes shoot them … it was never enough. They tore up everything. A local hunter scared them off. It was an act of desperation by young wolves looking for food in a time of scarcity’
Military veteran from the 1993 military intervention in Tajikistan against Mujahideen insurgents. Ottuk, February, 2023
‘In the Soviet times, all herders had support from the government. They all had pre-approved corrals everywhere and they had their own transport to move from corral to corral. The government used to limit the number of livestock and also show where to graze livestock. So they had winter pastures and summer pastures … and everywhere they had good corrals. After the Soviet Union, they destroyed all of these corrals to get construction materials’
Issyk Kul Region, Kyrgyzstan, 2023
‘As I look out of the window and into the mountains I feel as though my friend Ishinbek is sitting right beside me. Legends preserve not only the memory of a place and time but of the people who tell them’. Luke Oppenheimer will be signing books at AIPAD Photography Show in New York on Friday, April 24th at 2pm at booth P06Explore more on these topics
