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Public Project
Ulag players and Opera dancers
Copyright Louis Baudoin 2024
Updated Aug 2015
Location song kol kyrgyzstan
Topics Agriculture, Black and White, Documentary, nomad, Portraiture, Street, Travel
Song Kol is a lake nested in the mountains of Central Asia at an altitude of 3000m. It is surrounded by infinite meadows and high peaks, giving a strange contrast of the feeling of imprisonment within an expansive space. Every summer, families of shepherds migrate to the lake, offering the fresh pastures to their herd.

Sunset on the lake. Omurbek and I are riding his horse along the shore. It is getting cold there and the boy is whistling at the dogs to bring the goats back inside the pen. Wait... I know this tune - Casta Diva! My companion is an opera dancer during the winter and a shepherd and fierce Ulag player over the summer months. Ulag is a game that could sound heathen to our Western minds, a mix between horseball and rugby, played with a goat carcass. Song Kol meadows make a perfect training ground for the Shepherds to practice and perfect their technique for the next match. 

I am not an ethnologist or a reporter and maybe not even a photographer though, as a curious man of the world, I decided to approach the nomad population of Song Kol in Kyrgyzstan. I roamed the roads around the lake, looking for people and objects to connect with. The experience gave me a strange feeling of being very close despite that world being obscure and distant.
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