Luke Oppenheimer is a writer and documentary photographer from Oklahoma with a background in sustainable farming and history. His work focuses on human-wildlife conflict and the connections between culture, history, rural livelihoods and ecology. He spends years on each project, living and working in remote communities and learning their languages. He completed the one-year programme at the International Center of Photography in New York, and his work has been published in Modern Huntsman and EurasiaNet and exhibited at Picto Gallery in New York and the Hullet Collection in Tulsa. He divides his time between New York City and Nepal.
His book Ottuk (Aliens in Residence, 2026) began in the winter of 2021 as a one-month assignment about wolves killing livestock in a shepherd village in the Tien Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan. It became a five-year project about the people of the village, where one of the families adopted him. The book holds 45 colour photographs and ends with a picture of the shepherd Nadir walking away through the snow. (Website, Instagram)
