UB03: A Season in Outer Mongolia

UB03 paints realistic portrait in words and photographs of Ulaanbaatar and rural Mongolia (including the Gobi) during the author's Fulbright year of 2003. Pichaske meditates on trash and the Black Market, on opera singers and morin khuur concerts, on dogs and fences and slum districts and nomadic life in one of the harshest landscapes on the planet. His photos are rarely picturesque or touristy: he gives us instead stairs leading to nowhere, bags of groceries hanging outside of dormitory windows, dogs snoozing in the sun, MonRonald's Restaurant and Life Kife Bar & Pub, a section of paving stones mosaiced around the root of a tree, a herder on horseback pointing directions in the vast Gobi emptiness.