The Globe and Mail

Elaine Ling, a Toronto family doctor, went to the Gobi Desert in 2002 to take pictures, because that's what she does best. Ling has earned an international reputation as a photographer of the planet's furthest-flung places, and her specialty is the great deserts of the world.

Ling took her signature black-and-white photos of the flat and empty Gobi using her old-style view camera and Polaroid film, but it was what she discovered back in civilization – at the Mongolian National Museum in the country's bustling capital city of Ulan Bator – that ended up bringing her back to the land of Genghis Khan four more times.

At the museum, Ling saw a “small dusty diorama of standing stones in a barren landscape,” she writes in Mongolia: Land of the Deer Stone, her collection of remarkable photos from her five trips, from 2002-2008, to Mongolia. “I was very excited by the idea of a Mongolian ‘Stonehenge …'”

What Ling was looking at was an exhibit of Mongolia's Deer Stones – hundreds of carved stone monuments standing tall on the barren steppes in the northern reaches of the desert.

Little is known about Deer Stones. Archeologists have only recently begun excavating them in earnest, so it's still not known what they represent, or who left them there.

What is known is that they are located near Bronze Age burial mounds called khirigsuurs, but aren't burial markers themselves – at least not for human remains. They are surrounded by stones covering the remains of horses, the most prized possession of the nomads.

Also known is that they are the same age as the burial mounds, between 2,000 and 3,000 years old.

But the carvings on stones – of the faces of shamans, of stylized deer that appear to have bird-like beaks, of bows and arrows, daggers and more – still haven't revealed their meaning. They may mark the place where a fallen hero died, according to an essay published with Ling's photos, or they could honour the people buried in the nearby mounds, but scientists aren't sure yet.

For Ling, the stones were a link to the hundreds of thousands of pastoral nomads still roaming with their herds of sheep, goats, horses and camels across the Gobi Desert, and the steppes and forests north of the desert. What began as a project to photograph the landscape turned into a project to shoot the Deer Stones, which in turn led her to point her camera at the nomads and their timeless ways.

The tribes, many now equipped with cellphones, trucks and motorcycles, still follow their herds and the seasons, living in round felt tents called gers, burning animal dung to keep warm and moving between summer and winter homes in large caravans.

“Animals are your life,” writes William W. Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Study Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in another essay accompanying the photos. “Morning and night, they govern your every move, day after day. Nothing happens without thinking of the animals first. It has been so for at least 5,000 years.

“There are hardships; but it is, after all, almost entirely independent and spiritually free, as Elaine Ling's photographs so eloquently reveal.”

For Ling's part, she discovered people for whom hospitality is the highest priority. Every encounter with another family or a foreign photographer is a chance to share food and a cup of vodka or fermented horse milk, and to swap stories. “I learned to build extra time into my plans in order to properly honour local customs,” she writes.

Hospitality is so critical that families who temporarily leave their home tents never do so without first laying out food and drink for anyone who might stop by in their absence.

Writes Ling, “Hospitality is the essence of life and survival among the nomads.”

Ling's photos are presented uncropped, with the borders of the 4x5-inch Polaroid negatives included. This is a high-end collection of photographs, presented on heavy stock in quadtone black-and white, producing exceptionally rich images.

The learn more about the book visit www.elaineling.com.