It was one of those surreal moments that French photographer Jean-Louis Wolff loves. Last January, after a red-eye flight from Toronto to Paris, I arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport for a fashion shoot - something we had collaborated on countless times for this magazine, in such far-flung places as New Zealand, Mongolia and Seoul, his home of six years. After exchanging hugs, we collected my luggage and headed to a battered, silver bullet of a location bus. At first glance it looked unexceptional ... until you noticed the number plates, which were Korean, and its passengers, Wolff's make-up artist wife, Miae, their son, Marc, seven, and one-year-old daughter, Lilas. There was an overwhelming sense of deja vu until I digested the situation: this was the same vehicle that five months and 18,000 kilometres earlier had picked me up at Incheon airport in Seoul for another job. During that time, the family - accompanied by a video artist, photographic assistant and Cocotte, their gentle giant of a dog - had embarked on what must be one of the most ambitious, and some would say insane, road trips ever: a photoshoot that would take them from Seoul to Paris via China, Central Asia, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece and Italy, before they made their way back through Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Tibet.
Their mission? To connect two cities, two cultures and two continents, not to mention one eccentric couple, by documenting the faces of the women en route. Like a travelling circus, they would arrive in a town, search for unsuspecting beauties, and then Miae, 36, would make them up.
'It was more difficult than I expected,' she explains. 'Every culture and every woman has a different idea of what is beautiful, so you have to understand how far you can go when, in most cases, you weren't able to communicate. There's no point in doing something the subjects don't like or can't understand.'
It was up to Jean-Louis, 40, to persuade them to pose for photographs. 'We had to be quite inventive in the Muslim world,' he explains, 'and we weren't able to take any pictures in Iran, all the women were covered in black. But otherwise, most people were happy to be photographed. 'I remember one Uighur girl in Turpan. She was riding on a cotton cart with her father and, as we passed, I quickly asked my assistant to snap a digital photo. We waited for them up ahead, gave them a print-out and persuaded her father to let her come on board for a proper session. Generally, as soon as the women were in the bus, and the curtains were closed, they became quite comfortable. But sometimes you would have to photograph a mother-in-law before you got to the young bride.'
Their mobile home-cum-studio, a converted, 35-seat tourist bus, was equipped with everything they would need during the 40,000-km, 12-month journey: a fully equipped kitchen, washroom, heater, water tanks and a generator powerful enough to supply lights, hair-driers, a computer and children's toys. In addition to the portrait series, which will culminate in an exhibition in Seoul this year, the family met various magazines for fashion stories along the way (ours took us to Strasbourg, Jean-Louis' birthplace), made sure Marc kept on top of his studies, and took portraits of local families in exchange for food, a place to park or, as they did in Kyrgyzstan, a few hours of horse-riding.
It sounds like the trip of a lifetime, a 21st-century variation on the cliched hippy caravan, but without the Volkswagen. But it was also extremely dangerous at times. I was one of many friends and family, for instance, firing off e-mails begging them to come back when war broke out in Afghanistan. At the time, they were in Kyrgyzstan, waiting for a visa to enter Kazakhstan. Jean-Louis assured us they were far from the action, and that the only effects of the war were increased checkpoints and border bureaucracy. Besides, he wrote, the biggest threat in Central Asia was not bombing or militant Muslims, but poverty-stricken locals so drunk and desperate that they would do anything to get hold of car spares and cameras.
'There were lots of guys who would try and crash into us on purpose, just so they could negotiate damages,' he recalls. 'They are very, very poor, especially in the Aral Sea area. It used to be full of fisherman, but the fish stocks were wiped out so they started hunting rabbits. Now there are no more rabbits, but they still have guns and a lot of vodka.'