EDITION INFORMATION

For the past fifteen years, I have been making pilgrimages to the deserts and mountains of China’s western borders, focusing on Tibetan and Uyghur communities. These remote frontier regions are laced with contested geographies where religious and cultural legacies confront powerful economic and political transformations.

In these far away places, I look for way stations between cultures where one can see the past and future simultaneously. Seeing these changes over such a short time is a perspective that is at once disorienting and tragic. I try to make images that show these things, or at least some of the emotional truths behind them, because I know each time I return everything will be almost unrecognizable.

This tent is the home of a small community of hardscrabble loggers who live on this holy mountain. Tibetans consider the sources of rivers to be holy places and decorate them accordingly. The loggers tend to the prayer flags and serve tea to pilgrims. They cut trees when necessary and sell them to Chinese truckers who bring them back down to the mainland.