Matt Clements’ photographs of the Mongolian people and
landscape will be on show for about a month at the Cornwall Library early next
year. The exhibition will also include textiles woven by ethnic Kazakhs who
live in the Western section of the country, where Clements spent most of his
time.

Clements traveled to the isolated nation several times between 1992 and 1996,
initially as part of Raleigh International—a British de­­velopment charity
which sends service-minded volunteers overseas for projects in other countries.
He later traveled back to help a friend create a tourism company that offered horseback
riding tours.

Clements knew little about Mongolia before boarding the first plane, and describes
his time there, even as a traveler to several countries already, as a catalog
of culture shocks. “Mainly it was the diet,” he says. “It’s just unrecognizable
to the West … the local people live almost entirely off of dairy products or
meat, with nothing in between. You’d think some of the dairy would be familiar
to a Westerner, but yak butter was something quite new to me.”

Even getting drunk in Mongolia requires ingesting lactose. The drink of choice
is airag, or fermented mare’s milk with the consistency of sour cream. A
favorite food of Mongolians is groundhog, but they are careful to only shoot
healthy and alert ones, as sickly groundhogs are usually carriers of bubonic
plague.

While attempting to learn the language (which he describes as “sounding like
Yoda talking from Star Wars” if translated directly), Clements was also
surprised at the intensity of the cold during the one winter he spent there.
While walking home from work on a minus 40-degree day, the ice cream he was
eating (which, immediately after the Soviet Union collapsed, was impossible to
find during the warmer months) began to freeze beyond the point of edibility.

While he found the Mongolians and Kazakhs to be warm people, Clements also had
to navigate through a maze of practices and customs unique to the only country
on earth retaining a majority of nomads. “Their whole culture is based on
hospitality because the environment is so harsh, so when you go into one of the
yurts, you’re not allowed to knock, because that implies you may not be
welcome,” he said. “We were lucky to get briefed on all this stuff before we
arrived, like the fact that leaving one’s hat in a family home means you are
bound to marry one of the daughters.”

For those considering visiting Mongolia, Clements had this piece of advice: get
out of the dreary capital Ulaanbaatar, and see as much of the rest of the
country as possible.

“It’s really not representative of the country at all,” he said. “Mongolians
never built a lot of buildings besides some Buddhist monasteries, so like a lot
of former Soviet satellite cities, Ulaanbaatar has this cookie cutter layout of
ugly, characterless tower blocks. They house a lot of people, but the irony is
that they didn’t need them at all, because in Mongolia there’s plenty of space
to live.”

Since he found few buildings worth photographing, Clements’s subjects for his
black-and-white photos were mostly the people themselves. One of his most
touching captures a toddler inside a dark yurt, happily clutching an inflated
balloon almost as large as his torso. Mr. Clements explained that it is
considered condescending for tourists to give gifts to adults, but offering
them to children is acceptable.

“It was amazing that for how small a gift it was, how much fun these kids had
with them,” he recalled. “They weren’t used to having balloons around, and for
such a small gift, they caused a great deal of joy, which was very nice for us
to see.”