Hilton Chen
The Hunter
This is the patriarch of a family of Kazakh eagle hunters in western Mongolia. The Kazakhs immigrated to Mongolia in the 1850s from what is now Xinjiang Province in western China, and carried with them their traditional hunting method with the golden eagle. The eagles are captured as chicks and trained for 3-4 years. They then stay with the hunters until a maximum age of 8 years and then let go into the wild to continue with the rest of their lives. The birds are all females as they are larger, fiercer, and make for better hunters. The Kazakhs only use these eagles to hunt foxes for fur in the winter, and it generally takes 4-5 foxes to make a fur coat. I saw how the hunters treated their eagles with remarkable care and tenderness, so I tried to capture some of that dynamic between hunter and eagle in this portrait.
The Hunter
This is the patriarch of a family of Kazakh eagle hunters in western Mongolia. The Kazakhs immigrated to Mongolia in the 1850s from what is now Xinjiang Province in western China, and carried with them their traditional hunting method with the golden eagle. The eagles are captured as chicks and trained for 3-4 years. They then stay with the hunters until a maximum age of 8 years and then let go into the wild to continue with the rest of their lives. The birds are all females as they are larger, fiercer, and make for better hunters. The Kazakhs only use these eagles to hunt foxes for fur in the winter, and it generally takes 4-5 foxes to make a fur coat. I saw how the hunters treated their eagles with remarkable care and tenderness, so I tried to capture some of that dynamic between hunter and eagle in this portrait.