I find myself once again sitting in the in-between space of international travel. This time instead of being seated at the bar of an overpriced Turkish airport lounge, I’m stationed on a well-worn seat cushion in the nicest Starbucks I’ve ever seen at Incheon International Airport in Seoul.
The coffee I just bought from an aproned team of baristas is phenomenally terrible—like shockingly bad to the point where I had to take a second sip to fully grasp that coffee could taste so atrocious.
I added some milk and sugar and kept it pushing. I’m not afraid of shitty coffee and this will be one of the last cups I drink for the next five weeks.
I’m on my way back to a community of nomadic herders in western Mongolia to follow and document their spiritual relationship with wild wolves. A week and a half ago I was waiting tables saying things like, “It’s lush and delicate but has more structure than a typical Gamay.”
For those of you who have no idea what that means it’s probably for the best.
A week and a half from now I’ll be capturing the last moments of a fully grown wolf’s life as the family that’s been raising it prepares to slaughter it to use its organs as traditional medicine, its meat as spiritually imbued protein, and its bones as similarly energized tokens to ward off evil spirits.
I can’t figure out which part of my life, the tableside musings on natural wine, a wolf harvest, or my temporal airport existence feel most out of place.
It’s been less than three months since I was last with this community. It doesn’t feel like my mind, body, and spirit have caught up to each other since the last time I was there.
The in-between feeling I get sitting on a 10-hour layover feels like an all too obvious metaphor for the in-between space it feels like I have personally been inhabiting for the last five months—by the end of November I will have spent 10 weeks in an incredibly remote community in western Mongolia and 12 weeks in Austin, Texas where I live.
As I sit here, I hear the familiar sibilance that’s a part of the Mongolian language. I’m getting closer. Pretty soon I’ll be covered in four layers of clothing riding a horse through waist-deep snow in search of a fully-grown wolf.
The night before I left for Mongolia, I found myself at the surprise celebration for two friends who had recently eloped. Without a chance to celebrate their marriage properly, we forced a celebration upon them.
As the dinner went on, I found myself ambling through my packing list in my head. It doesn’t matter how much I travel, I still never learn to pack early. As I grappled with the items I’d need to throw in my bag, I let myself start to think about what I’m about to witness—what I’ll need to capture as a photographer.
Pulled from my thoughts I heard my friend ask, “Are you okay Dimitri?”
I guess I looked more uncomfortable than I realized.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just incredibly anxious. I’ll probably head out pretty soon.”
“What are you so anxious about? Do you still have to pack?”
“Yeah, but it’s more about the story. I only have one chance at this.”
After some more back and forth she finally asked,
“Why are you putting so much pressure on yourself?”
To truly answer that question would have required an intensity I didn’t feel capable of mustering or appropriate for the moment.
Sitting on this increasingly uncomfortable seat cushion that pressure is all I can think about. I feel the intensity in my chest—presenced by the feeling I couldn’t tap into the other night.
I know exactly why I’m putting so much pressure on myself. And while the anxiety of the moment isn’t necessarily comfortable, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
There will only ever be one chance to capture this version of this story.
The pressure I put on myself is the pressure to get it right.
To capture a moment that will only ever happen once.
To do justice to the community that has welcomed me into their world to tell their story.
But the moment I’m hoping to capture isn’t even a specific moment I know exists yet. It’s something I will see in front of me, or maybe I won’t. That’s the fear. That the moment, series of moments, or multitude of moments spread out over the course of a month will pass me by. That I’ll miss the singular moment or the amalgamation of moments that tell the story I’m following.
That it will be right in front of me and it won’t be until later that I realize I missed it.
Or, maybe even worse, that I’ll know an instant after it flashed before my shutter that I was just 1/1000ths of a second too late.
It would be an easy cop-out to say this is something only other photographers could understand, but I think anyone can grasp what I’m talking about.
Think about the times in your life that felt ordinary in the moment, but that you still cling to years later.
The moments that you felt assured would repeat, but never did.
Imagine trying to capture those moments in an image as they are happening.
In some ways that’s an impossible task, but that’s what is so special about truly great photography. It does capture those moments.
My goal is not to take pretty pictures, my goal is to capture imagery that transcends my own ambitions as a photographer—to create images that will continue to transmit something meaningful about the world long after I’m no longer a part of it.
So yeah, that’s a lot of pressure to put on myself.
But if that’s not what I’m after then what the fuck I am doing? Truly.
That’s how I feel.
The real magic of all of this is that of all the moments I have captured for this story, none of them have been promised. When I started this story last spring, before going on our first wolf hunt I met a herder who had spent an entire month hunting every single day. It wasn’t until his last day of hunting consecutively for thirty days that he successfully killed a wolf.
I could see the exhaustion in his weathered face and posture. There was an intensity in his voice as he recounted that month of hunting in the snow.
I feared that after years of thinking about this story, I might not even see a wolf after coming all this way. The herders I’d follow might not successfully hunt and kill one while I was with them. The chances of finding a wolf den were so incredibly slim. These were the elements to the story that I had been thinking about for 8 years before arriving back in western Mongolia for the first time since 2016.
Now, almost two years into this story, everything I had imagined and so much more has manifested in front of my eyes. At every turn, while my imagery is far from perfect, I feel that I’ve been able to capture what has transpired in front of me.
In many ways, it feels like the last two years have culminated in this likely final trip for this story. One in which I don’t have as clear of a vision of what I’m hoping to capture simply because I haven’t had 8 years to think about it—I’ve only had 3 months.
The terrifying part about this trip is that I only have one chance to close the circle. The elements in the story will never again line up so perfectly.
The explosively beautiful part about this final trip is that I actually have this singular chance to close the circle.
Someone told me that anxiety and excitement can feel the same in your body. Depending on the moment it feels like I’m feeling one or the other. It’s probably a mix of both.
My computer just told me the battery is about to die.
I should probably stop writing anyway.
I want to brush my teeth to get the taste of this terrible coffee out of my mouth but the Korean TSA confiscated my quarter tube of toothpaste that was, at one point, over the allowable limit for non-solid substances traveling through the air.
I’ll figure it out.