I have photographed 30+ stories for the National Geographic magazines over the past 18 years. But all of it, all of my career, stands on the shoulders of one story that I shot in a valley high in the Caucasus mountains of Georgia. It is a place called Svanetia, where people still live in homes attached to 12th century defensive towers and speak a language that has never been written. It was my first story (1998), the first story that made me fall in love with a people and a place, and it shaped all of my photography after that. 15 years later National Geographic sent me back for a magazine feature story. In that return I rediscovered all that love again, all that poetry, in the people and the land. For me, of all my landscape images made on those return trips, this is the lone that most embodies that love and poetry.
In this image light from a setting sun strikes the medieval towers of Ushguli, Georgia at the final end of the valley's road. Here live a people that were known as "the Children of the Sun" for worshiping the Sun God, Lile’. This small community of around 200 is the highest continuously inhabited village in Europe, where ancient traditions continue to flourish. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site with defensive towers raging from the 9th to 12th century. Behind it is Skhara, the highest peak in Georgia at 5,193 m (17,037 ft) high, shrouded in clouds.
Photographed in 2013, 7200 x 7200px.
