And yet few outsiders spend much time there. Foreign academics have largely been barred from research, with several prominent scholars of Xinjiang banned from entering China. Foreign journalists tend to fly in and out for a dateline and an interview. The American photographer Carolyn Drake is an exception.<\/p>\n
Drake has been traveling to Xinjiang since 2007, when she began photographing Central Asia from her base in Istanbul. Over the years, she has come to know the region well, and struggled to break free from its clich\u00e9s. The summation of her work is Wild Pigeon<\/em>, an ambitious, beautiful, and crushingly sad book.<\/p>\n The book gets its name from a fable by a Uighur writer named Nurmuhemmet Yasin, about a wild pigeon that dreams he travels to the land of humans. He wakes up and is told by his mother that his father, a leader of the wild pigeons, was captured and has committed suicide. Now it is his turn to lead the pigeons and try to find them a new home far away from humans. He takes wing, but he too is captured and commits suicide.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t take too much imagination to see how this can be seen as an allegory of the Uighurs\u2019 plight. China\u2019s largest administrative region, Xinjiang is about the size of Alaska, or a country like Iran. The area has always been at the periphery of the Chinese empire, and was only settled by Chinese in large numbers after the founding of the People\u2019s Republic. Traditionally, most inhabitants were Turkic peoples, Uighurs or Kazakhs. They were herders, or traders living in former oasis settlements around the Taklamakan Desert. The area was mainly of strategic value\u2014it borders several Central Asian countries, as well as Russia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan\u2014but later became an important source of oil.<\/p>\n According to government figures, the Uighurs are Xinjiang\u2019s dominant ethnic group but they have been losing ground demographically to Han Chinese, who have been encouraged to migrate there over the past few decades. Uighurs are also economically subservient, with most of the best-paying jobs in, say, the oil industry going to Chinese migrants.<\/p>\n Censorship of low-circulation magazines is often slack in China, and Nurmuhemmet\u2019s story was published in 2004 in a local literary journal without problem. When authorities noticed it later that year, however, they banned it, arrested Nurmuhemmet<\/a>, convicted him of \u201cinciting Uighur separatism,\u201d and sentenced him to ten years in prison\u2014a draconian sentence, but typical for the harsh repression used to counter possible critics of Chinese rule. (He was due for release late last year but human rights groups have received no word of his fate.)<\/p>\n Drake includes a translation of Nurmuhemmet\u2019s story at the end of Wild Pigeon<\/em>, with phrases and sentences from it interspersed between the book\u2019s chapter-like sections. \u201cNow houses and neighborhoods appear below, along with living, moving creatures,\u201d reads one of these interludes. \u201cThey must be the humans whom my mother warned me to avoid.\u201d<\/p>\n The book opens with a series of dream-like photos, printed on sheets of paper about an inch shorter than the next section, making them seem provisional. Gorgeous and blurry, they show such scenes as men repairing a phone line in the middle of nowhere, a forgotten family portrait resting on a shelf, a person lying beneath a shroud. They are untitled and without comment\u2014information about the images included here was provided separately by the photographer\u2014but as with many good photo books, the sequence is crucial: a veiled woman walking down a street on one page, men bathing on the next; parched fields, flooded orchards. The cumulative effect is one of loneliness and anomie, with the subjects often expressing a kind of alienation or lack of autonomy that underlies many ethnic minorities\u2019 experiences<\/a> in China.<\/p>\n Then comes the most courageous part of the book, printed on full-sized paper. Drake writes in an afterword that the political climate had placed a barrier between her and her subjects. \u201cI decided to stop taking so many pictures\u2026and find ways to bring the people I was meeting into the creative process.\u201d She did so by returning to Xinjiang with prints, and a box of scissors, pencils, paints, and glue. Meeting, as she writes, in \u201crestaurants, art studios, shoe shops, walnut orchards, public parks, courtyards, hotel rooms, slaughterhouses, and jade bazaars,\u201d she gave up control over her creations and encouraged her subjects to cut, color, and reassemble the photos, making new works of art.<\/p>\n One of the most striking pictures from the dream sequence\u2014a person sleeping under a red gauze\u2014acquires blue and turquoise lines. Construction scenes are reassembled into a collage where a backhoe becomes a monster. A man standing in an old city gets colorful clothing and a hat. A tree acquires leaves. A person gains an aura-like layer of spiky lines.<\/p>\n It would be reductionist to give these collages a single interpretation, but one comes away with an overwhelming sense of Drake\u2019s participants grabbing the agency she has given them to create images that reorder, soften, or explain the rigidly authoritarian society in which they live. This is a form of resistance, but not the overt kind that makes headlines. It is the quiet reinterpretation of daily life that often is out of the Uighurs\u2019 control.<\/p>\n This section is part of the long tradition of documentary photographers trying to break through their position as outsiders imposing an interpretation on a community\u2014for example, by handing out cameras to local people. Some people might feel such efforts are a bit forced, but they reflect legitimate concerns of a profession where photographers often interact minimally with their subjects. Drake\u2019s method is more suitable for a society under surveillance\u2014equipping people with cameras might yield only detentions\u2014but it still suffers from some inherent limitations.<\/p>\n One issue are expectations: In making these interventions, are people actually giving you what they think you want? I felt this when looking at one of the creations by a Uighur who was fairly fluent in English. The person eliminated the children from the family picture and drew in crossed Chinese and American flags with the prediction that \u201cCommunist China will be collapsed,\u201d while labeling the US as \u201cdemocratic\u201d and China as \u201cfascist.\u201d<\/p>\n Overall, however, this section of the book succeeds in giving the Uighurs a voice they rarely seem to have in the usual portrayal of their region. And then we are back to the smaller-sized pages. These begin with a few sentences from the short story where the pigeon sees human habitation: \u201cthey must be the humans whom my mother warned me to avoid.\u201d Nicely ambiguous, however, is that these pictures are not of Chinese but Uighurs. We see striking pictures of daily life: a harvest, a brilliantly layered picture in a barber shop, followed by a complex picture of four people of different ages in a street with motor scooters. Its hard to find a definite, clear message in these images but this may be their strength: they force you to stop, wonder, and think about the lives of people in Xinjiang as they are actually lived.<\/p>\n The main pages of the book end with several dark and moody pictures showing a crumbling old city, perhaps being razed for redevelopment; they are probably from Kashgar, the regional capital. Their placement at the end of the book may be inspired by the pigeon\u2019s torment in the cage before he commits suicide at the end of Nurmuhemmet\u2019s story. Then comes the text of the fable itself.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/media\/img\/blogimages\/pond-wild-pigeon_jpg_600x627_q85.jpg\")
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Carolyn Drake
Uighurs visiting the ponds that are the remains of the once 10,000-square-kilometer Tarim Lake, 2009<\/em><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/media\/img\/blogimages\/pool-wild-pigeon_jpg_600x627_q85.jpg\")
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Carolyn Drake
A pool hall in Darya Boye, a riverside village in the Taklamakan desert, 2008<\/em><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/media\/img\/blogimages\/backhoe-wild-pigeon_jpg_600x769_q85.jpg\")
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Carolyn Drake
A collage made by two teenagers in a park in Hotan, southwestern Xinjiang, 2013<\/em><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/media\/img\/blogimages\/jade-wild-pigeon_jpg_600x673_q85.jpg\")
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Carolyn Drake
Jade diggers along Xinjiang\u2019s White Jade River, with coloring and Chinese writing by local Uighurs, 2012<\/em><\/div>\n
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