In her new series, Mette Tronvoll again confronts us with people from the periphery: Mongolian horsemen, fighters, mothers, married couples, children, and youths. Set in their native landscape against a wide, unobstructed horizon, they face the camera directly. The steppes and mountains behind them are almost Arcadian, a backdrop for half-forgotten myths that speak of romantic freedom and heroic conquests. Thus preserved in their untouched natural surroundings, the figures become idealized images of remoteness, far from our urban centers and our grasp of time. Mongolia has always been an independent state, but in the twentieth century it found itself geopolitically hemmed in by two superpowers: the People's Republic of China and the former USSR. Although alternately influenced by both, the country continually managed to preserve its own identity. Its nomadic citizens still set up their gers as they did in the days of Djenghis Khan, still gird their jackets against the wind and cold as they have since time immemorial. At first glance, Tronvoll's images of contemporary Mongolians show us people in their traditional circumstances. Exquisite details, of clothing and surroundings, the animated facial expressions of the figures, all attest to the foreignness of the lifestyles portrayed. Yet, upon closer observation, our first impressions shift. For here, too, are traces of our own global consumer culture: a mass-produced pullover here, a Nike sneaker there. Even in paradise. One almost yearns to be caught up in the old clichés, the ideal notions of purity and primordiality that early-twentieth-century modern thinkers posited upon so-called aboriginal peoples. But the reality recorded here disrupts that dream. Tronvoll's images are part of a long tradition of photographic expeditions, important since the medium's inception. Here, again, is the living exotic subject shown in an equally exotic natural setting, brought to – and exhibited within the context of – those who remain at home. But even as these images stoke the viewer's yearnings for the faraway, only to shatter them ironically, there is another tension: namely, that between the appearance of the outside world and of Tronvoll herself. Stylistically, these are static compositions with nothing of the snapshot about them. They are situational and avoid narrative. Tronvoll's subjects face the camera deliberately, without emotional expression, as in a studio portrait. Like August Sander, Tronvoll creates an apparently objective form of visual presentation that records the facts of those portrayed; this is no mere typological system of horsemen or housewives. And the work resolves itself not in narration but in observation. The only thing subjective is Tronvoll's attitude in pursuing particular topics over the course of various series of works. Her theme always revolves around the temporal, whether she contrasts individual portraits of older and younger women as in the series Age (1994) or, as in Double Portraits (1998), presents side-by-side two almost identical photos of the same person, taken in quick succession. In her individual and group portraits of bathers on the island of Unartoq, Greenland, of 1999, she subtly evokes the same theme. And here, too, in the new series of images from Mongolia, she understands how to dissolve space into the mythological, allowing the figures to seem like busts carved from stone. The temporal vanishes into the eternal, only to be brought back to itself through those manifest traces of global civilization. Sassa Trülzsch, Berlin 2004.