Monkey Boys, China 1996. On view through May 30 at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in Chelsea, at 521 W. 26th Street

Gerald Förster’s globe-spanning work, LightYears, which began in the mid ‘90s and was completed mostly before 2001 (with a handful of exceptions), was a prescient photographic document of our global era. Like other photographers before him and since, the impulse to preserve the dignity of “others” before cultural erosion alters them, or even wipes them away completely, is very present here. But unlike other photographers inspired to this type of ethnographic portraiture, who usually tend to focus on one group of people or geographic location (Wilfred Thesiger, Irving Penn, and many others come to mind), Förster’s work is that of a lensman working at hyper-speed to capture a moment of utter stillness, perhaps even an eternal moment. While I suppose Förster chose LightYears as the title of his project to refer to something inexpressibly infinite in the human being and our collective mysterious existence on this rock we call Earth, for me the title also conjures the 747s he and his longtime friend and collaborator Anthony Smith sped around the world on between advertising jobs and editorial assignments, to photograph these people in eighteen countries. Whether that was the intention or not, LightYears is indeed a project made possible by the ease of global air travel that had its rise in the 1990s. It’s something we might easily overlook, so standard has it become to go everywhere and see everything — right from our desktops. Ultimately though, Förster’s work reminds us that we inhabit a world full of people not like us and yet composed of the same cosmic material. Like the great Polish writer Ryszard Kapusinski used to do through his travelogues, Förster is holding up the mirror to the other in us all.