I refresh this blog starting in Kashgar, an old Silk Road city located on the western edges of the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China. Kashgar a thousand plus years ago was a bustling place, a trading hub, where  merchants brought their goods ranging from spices to silk. Walking through the Old City today, the streets are lined with hundreds of stores and artisans. It’s like being thrown right back to a time long past. The sound of clang clang clang, hammers coming down on copper and tin wares, fill the narrow streets; wood shavings spill out onto the sidewalks from the tiny shops selling candle holders, while hawkers push along donkey carts topped with vegetables and fruits.

Xinjiang province with a population of about 3.5 million people, is inhabited by a majority of ethnically Turkic people– Uighurs– though numbers of Han Chinese have steadily increased to over 40 percent in the last 60 years. The province’s abundance of rare earth, oil, and natural gas reserves have drawn many Han Chinese to the area for employment and has prompted the Chinese government to rapidly transform the region with modern facilities and residential areas. Kashgar is, in short, on its way to being a typical modern Chinese city. An estimated 85 percent of the Old City is planned to be demolished under the premise of creating more fire and earthquake-safe houses, while other less-mentioned reasons include the Chinese government’s fear of separatist movement activities, some of which the Chinese government claims to have ties with jihadists internationally. New brightly colored housing estates are shooting up all over the city, while the old two-storey houses are bulldozed over. Officials have claimed to have consulted Uighurs in residence there about new projects and continue to do so throughout their developments. From what I could see though, the mood there in Kasghar was one of helplessness and the feeling that the Uighurs themselves needed to concede to the changes, perhaps because of inevitability, or for fear of retribution if they don’t.

Here’s a look into the old, changing, and new Kasghar.

Kashgar – Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, China

Doing homework in the Old City

The occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the PRC’s founding (October 1) made sure that no efforts were spared for celebration

at the Id Kah Mosque, China’s largest mosque

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Old Kashgar

A scene in the Old City

A baker and his family

Children watch television outside a store

Women sit in a doorway talking and knitting

One of the hundreds of meat shops around Kashgar

A tailor shop in the Old City

A workshop making bamboo steaming baskets

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Changing Kashgar

Old houses are torn down and then rebuilt. This one family was responsible for the construction of their new home.

more construction
A neighborhood mosque at sunset

Uighur men walk past boards displayed outside the main mosque in Kashgar. The boards show plans for the construction of new residential buildings, Uighurs fervently holding Chinese flags in ‘appreciation’ of the Chinese government’s efforts, as well as pictures of Chinese officials touring Kashgar’s Old City.

A Uighur man walks out of one of the hundreds of construction sites around the city

Boys play football in a pit where new residential buildings will be built

After-school football. Uighur children are now required to attend classes taught in Mandarin

A Uighur woman walks amidst the construction

A glimpse into the courtyard of a traditional uighur house

A Uighur worker pulls up dirt from a pit as new tunnel ways are made for pipes and other small infrastructure

A bridge connecting to the Old City under construction

Food stalls opened by Han Chinese serving up other fellow Han have become a common sight around Kasghar

The People’s Square with a statue of Chairman Mao standing at 59 ft. tall

The Old City by night

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New Kashgar

PLA soldiers on duty in the People’s Square outside the Renmin Park (The People’s Park)

On the south east side of the city is Dong Lake, a place that has been transformed into a modern park, not short of neon lights at night, with a vast amount of recreational space

A part of the Old City, which is being preserved mostly for tourism, is lit up at night

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The Last of the Kashgar tea houses

The rapid changes in Kashgar are sweeping both landmarks and pastimes away. One in particular is the habit of men sitting in teahouses, which fill up in the late afternoon with retired folks who sit and chat, sometimes in to the early evening sipping on flower tea. Nondescript from the outside, the moment you walk into this one teahouse I frequented, is like a moment of finding some treasure.

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The Sunday Crush

Scenes from Kasghar’s livestock and Sunday markets.

Back in March as I was working on the documentary arts project on the World Trade Center, I spent some time near the Church St. fence looking out for some while at the scene from the inside, looking out. Every time you pass by the site there are point and shoot cameras abound, foreign and American tourists and New Yorkers, too, curious to get a glimpse of what goes on at the site. In fact, I found that any insight the public gets readily excites them, and fair enough– it’s a 16-acre site completely fenced off and the only view you can get of it are through the ripped canvasses on the fences or from towers surrounding it. Few people really grasp what is going on at the World Trade Center– it is rebuilding– save that there is just a whole lot of politics and seemingly nothing else happening. Here’s a little glimpse of what Church St. looks like from inside of the site, curiosities and passersby, all day, everyday.

One for the road: this is Terry Coyote Murphy– part Cherokee, part Irish. Union Square Park, July 22.

a building in Tribeca, New York.

in the East Village

cristian

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Blue Gap, AZ– 12.09. A matriarch in this community, this elderly woman had injured herself pretty badly that week after falling off a ladder and bruising her face. She had barely enough hay to see her sheep through the winter too. It’s intriguing to see that the oldest generation continue to keep to their traditional ways of life for the most part, whilst the youngest, in their 20s, aspire to a different kind of life, one generally not involving the care of livestock. Women well into their 80s will walk several miles a day, chop their own wood, and tend to their beloved cattle or sheep– their resilience is really quite awesome.

Colors and shapes: a view of Canyon de Chelley near Chinle, AZ. 12.09.

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Back in April, a friend and classmate approached me to ask if I could photograph her and her best friends, who were also dorm/room mates at NYU. It was about the last time in probably a long time they’d all be together, as some were graduating and others stayed, and they really wanted something that they could remember their time by: a ‘family’ album of sorts. I only spent a few hours hanging out with them on a rather blazingly hot Spring afternoon, and only having just met them as I walked into the door, I was totally embraced and given a fair share of the cookie dough they were in the midst of making… I’d never had that group of friends to share something so intimate with during college, it made me actually yearn for the group I used to spend my time with back in high school, but it amazed me and made me very fully happy to see how much love there was going all round. This one goes to friendship and the bonds we vow never to lose.

quintessentially New York: the view from room 602 at NYU’s Broome St. dorm. April, 2009.

from left to right: Arianna, Namrita, Foram, Kaysi, and Michaela

Namrita gets ready for the senior formal

making of the very, very scrumptiously buttery cookie dough.

Serving up brunch at the party pad

before the finale; with an incredibly talented and heartwarming group of people. clockwise from top left: Brandon Thibodeaux, Brenda Bravo, Mustafah Abdulaziz, Matt Craig, Blake Gordon, Tim Hussin, Alex Welsh, Jeff Enlow, myself

downtown Charlottesville, maybe around 1am on Saturday? it’s all a little fuzzy

down by the lake

toast to a perfect day: a late awakening, driving under blue skies, a cold swim, getting groceries,cooking in the kitchen commune, good conversation and great company all the way through. 

more updates coming as more gets under way, that’s promised….