Looking through your photos, it is a wide range of work, and not just focused within the water. So in terms of interacting people in some very remote areas, can you talk about your experience working with those who don’t necessarily interact with others beyond their region?

Yeah, to me that has been one of the greatest and most fun aspects of my work. Because I think we are becoming a very homogenous westernized civilization all across the planet. But the truth is, we are very tribal. Until very recently the vast majority of people lived in small tribal communities. This is not so long ago. And those people hold a lot of knowledge on what it means to live in harmony with earth, and before we lose that knowledge I want to capture with my camera what that experience is like.

I call it sacred ecology. For indigenous people and people who live in remote areas, it just means how they relate to nature. But we all have a sacred ecology, even you and I, even though we are city people, we love walking around in the park. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t enjoy walking through a beautiful forest, and that is part of our sacred ecology. But we have forgotten where the water in the tap comes from, and where the trash that we dump goes to. So I want my photos to remind people of that, to reconnect with nature and to talk to those people who still remember what it is like to live in harmony with nature.

So I have to ask you about one of my favorites images of yours — the woman with the duck on her head?

It’s not a duck, it’s a goose: an early image by Cristina among the ethnic minorites in southwestern China. (Photo courtesy of Cristina Mittermeier)

It’s actually a goose. (laughs) I took that very early in my career when I was just beginning to understand what I wanted to do with my photographs.

I had the opportunity to travel to China. We went to a very remote part of China in the southwestern corner ,which is on the border with Tibet. And that’s where you find a lot of the minorities from Tibet that were overtaken by China, and they have been very marginalized. It is a very interesting corner of China, because these people are not really Chinese. They are from other ethnic groups.

So I was having lunch in a market and I had just purchased a Yashica single reflex camera…and I was playing with it at the lunch table in this market. I was looking through the top and I saw this woman walking towards me. (Of course, when you look through the top of a single reflex camera the image is inverted.) So I saw her walking at me upside down, and she had this goose on her head, and so I got up and walked towards her…and I took 3 exposures. And out of those three frames only one of them was in focus.

It’s a beautiful image, which has a kind of painter’s quality to it.

Well you know I’m fascinated by the Dutch masters, like Renoir and how he would master the light. I think something all of us photographers should be doing is studying art — and painting in particular — because you should look for that kind of light in photographs.