Spirits and Ghosts : Journeys Through Mongolia

by Calfee, Julia

• ISBN13: 9781576871676
• ISBN10: 1576871673
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-01
• Publisher: Random House Inc

Summary

Spirits and Ghosts: Journeys through Mongoliadelves into the transitions and changes in Mongolia since 1996, addressing the issues and problems of this country that is still steeped in the murkiness of the post-Communist era, and awkwardly adapting to a new democratic system. Calfee documented the role of shamanism and ritual in this mysterious land, participating in the winter migration of a female shaman and her family over the mountains, sleeping on ice-covered fields at 40deg; C, and taking photographs of her private seacute;ances, rarely seen by anyone outside of this exclusive nomadic culture. Calfee also spent years documenting the social ills of this little-understood East-Central Asian republic, spending days and nights in different prisons with adolescents, women, alcoholics, murderers, and many innocent people. Whether exploring the work camps that have not changed since Stalinrs"s time, makeshift strip-mining conditions, rampant alcoholism, or the general hopelessness of urban life in the capital, Calfeers"s unflinching and haunting images leave a strong sense of correspondence between social problems and the dark spirituality of this troubled land.

Author Biography

Julia Calfee studied journalism at New York University and art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. She has exhibited her work at the Fondation Miro of Palma de Mallorca, among others. After going to Mongolia in 1997, she worked with a non-governmental organization to spearhead a horse-drawn medical caravan covering over 2,000 miles in the Steppes. The exhibition of her travels with a female shaman over her winter migration, "Mountain Spirits of Mongolia," has been shown at the Brussels Art Centre and will travel to the United Nations in New York and other venues. Calfee lives in Brussels. Antonin Kratochvil, born in the Czech Republic in 1947, is a photojournalist whose work appears in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times magazines, Newsweek, Esquire, and Detour, among many others. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and others. Recipient of the International Center of Photography Award for Photojournalism and The Picture of the Year Award, Kratochvil lives in New York City

Table of Contents

Urban Scapes	p. 8
Steppes	p. 42
Journey with a Shaman	p. 74
Spirits	p. 92
Gobi Desert	p. 102
Ghosts	p. 118
Skyscape	p. 158
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