An elderly woman in a Hunza cap holds a baby on her lap
Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan

Peaks&People

A journey through the high valleys, and the people who hold them up

A note on this work

The photographs and the writing in Peaks and People are our own, created by us and belonging to us. Every person shown here was photographed with their knowledge and consent. Nothing was taken in secret, and no one was made into a subject without agreeing to be one. This work is not made to sell a place. It is made to give an honest and close understanding of these valleys and the people who hold them up, shown with the dignity they are owed.

A book about
the people
of
Gilgit-Baltistan

We spend everything we have trying to reach a place of enough. More money, more speed, more things, a life that always sits one year ahead of us. There are people in these mountains who are already there. Who have, and know they have, everything they need. They are not behind the world. They are ahead of it, and they have been for a thousand years. This book is about them, and about the one thing they still have that the rest of us have lost.

The first light

There is a place near the top of the world where the mountains are so high they make their own weather. Green valleys run like threads between grey giants. Water comes down from the ice into the wheat and the orchards, and onto the flat roofs where apricots are laid out to dry in the sun. A woman kneels at the channel to turn the water into her field before the light has reached the ridge. Somewhere a stove is lit, and a stranger is being fed before he has his boots off. By any measure it is one of the most beautiful places on earth, and the people in it are part of why.

Two boys lying on the stone edge of a village pool A hand turning apricots laid out to dry

A truth this quiet only shows itself to someone who stays

The world already has its pictures of this place. The peak at dawn, the lake beneath it, the empty road. They show everything about how it looks and nothing about why it matters. The wealth here was never the view. It is in the people.

A woman standing in a wooden doorway set in a dry-stone wall

Why we are doing this?

These people have carried a whole way of living and no one has ever set it down while they were still the ones living it. Because the world is almost here, and when it arrives this will be a place that used to be, remembered wrong or not at all. We are doing this so it is written once, truly, by someone who belongs to it. So that the people who already have everything the rest of us are chasing are finally seen having it. Not pitied. Not turned into a postcard. Seen, while there is still time to see them clearly.

Peaks&People

A journey through the high valleys, and the people who hold them up

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