(Images: Jeroen Toirkens/Lux Photo Gallery/nomadslife.com)
THE world, we鈥檙e often told, is getting smaller. You know that鈥檚 true when, north of the Arctic Circle, you erect your traditional nomadic tent, or lavvu, under a lamp post and in front of a row of ski jumps (main image). This is Murmansk, in the far north-west of Russia. The girl in front of the lavvu, Anna, is one of the Sami people, the indigenous Scandinavians sometimes called Laplanders.
Photographer Jeroen Toirkens was trekking in the remote Bolkar mountains in southern Turkey in 1999 when he first met people living a nomadic life. That encounter made a deep impression on him. 鈥淚 spent the next 11 years documenting the lives of these people,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 want to show the nomadic way of life in a modernising world at the beginning of the 21st century. It fascinates me that such a way of life still exists.鈥�
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In some cases Toirkens has returned to the same families over the years and witnessed the changes in their way of life. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 see myself as a nomad but it is a great adventure to travel to these remote places and meet with these people,鈥� he says. Among the many nomads he has photographed is a girl in the Gobi desert (above) and a shepherd on a reindeer sled in Nenets Autonomous Okrug in Russia (bottom). Toirkens鈥檚 travels are documented in his .
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥�21st century nomads鈥�
