$60.00 U.S. (trade discount)
E-book TBD.
Hardcover
248 pages with 126 photographs by the author and 4 historic maps = 130
10.875″ x 12″ portrait/upright
ISBN: 978-1-938086-99-1
Published August 2023
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the Scanlan Family Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and Center for the Study of Place
Events and Exhibitions
Tuesday, March 12, 2024 at 5:30pm
Artist Talk
Williams College
Thursday, October 26, 2023 at 5pm
Artist Talk
The Research & Development Store, MASS MoCA
Thursday, October 5, 2023
from 4:30 pm to 6 pm
Artist Talk
Visual Arts Center, Bowdoin College Museum of Art,
Brunswick, ME
(read an article about the artist talk)
Read a review in Bowdoin Alumni Review (2024)
Interview with Bubriski in The Diplomat (2024) (pdf)
Interview with Bubriski on Vermont Edition
Listen to NPR’s “Waiting to Be Arrested” with poet Tahir Hamut Izgil (8/2023)
Publishers Weekly has listed The Uyghurs as one of the top 10 Art, Architecture & Photography books coming out in 2023!
by Kevin Bubriski
with text and poems by Tahir Hamut Izgil
essay by Dru C. Gladney
(English/Uyghur bilingual edition)
Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction.
Winner of a 2024 IPPY Gold Medal in Photography and Silver Medal in History (Oversized)
2023 Foreword Reviews INDIES Gold Medal in Photography + and Honorable Mention in Multicultural
2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards: Coffee Table/Photography Finalist
2024 NYC Big Book Aaward Winner: Islamic
In 1998, Kevin Bubriski was fortunate to spend time with the Uyghurs in Kashgar, their ancient city on the old Silk Road in the Xinjiang region of China. While there, he made unforgettable photographic portraits and street scenes that reveal a haunting beauty and sense of the city’s deep past. Bubriski was drawn to the faces of ordinary people and their daily lives, with the intent that through photographs mutual understanding between people might be fostered.
Although 1998 was an uncomfortable time of rapid transformation for the Uyghurs, their oasis city in the high desert was still vibrant, even as the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown on religion, language, culture, and personal freedom in Xinjiang was about to commence. In the last few years, Chinese state authorities led by Xi Jinping have investigated at least 4.7 million people and up to a million Uyghurs have been detained in “re-education camps” while others have been subjected to forced sterilizations, forced labor, and family separations. The vibrancy, beauty, and grit of Kashgar and its people that Bubriski witnessed and photographed more than two decades ago has irrevocably changed, making his images all the more significant.
The Uyghur cultural, economic, familial, religious, and spiritual traditions are captured in Bubriski’s images, and the incisive prose and poetry from Kashgar poet and activist Tahir Hamut Izgil and a historical essay by the late Dru Gladney add depth and understanding to the Uyghurs’ plight. Longstanding religious and cultural traditions, interwoven in Uyghurs’ lives and community for more than two millennia, have been severely impacted by the overt and disastrous policies of the Chinese government’s colonization of Uyghur civil, religious, and cultural life. The Uyghur community, a group of around 12 million, is now fractured and split due to widespread surveillance, mass detentions, and incarcerations. Downloading the Qur’an can be grounds for interrogation.
Since innumerable Uyghur families are now separated due to mass detentions, forced labor, residential schools, and flight to asylum elsewhere, The Uyghurs is an enduring gift for the Uyghur people and those who wish to understand better Uyghur culture and history. The book is also presented in a bilingual edition so that it is accessible to Uyghur people living in non-English-speaking regions of the world, offering a way for Uyghurs around the world to reaffirm their cultural and social identity wherever they now live. Bubriski’s book is a stunning work of art and conscience that reveals a time when Kashgar, beloved city of the Uyghurs, retained much of its traditional life and charm.
About
About the Author
Kevin Bubriski is a documentary photographer who was born in 1954 in North Adams, Massachusetts. He earned his B.A. in liberal arts at Bowdoin College in 1975 and his M.F.A. in new media at Bennington College in 1997. His photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has received Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, Asian Cultural Council, Hasselblad Masters, and Robert Gardner Peabody Museum fellowships. Bubriski’s other books include Portrait of Nepal (Chronicle, 1993), which won the 1993 First Place Golden Light Documentary book award, Power Places of Kathmandu (Inner Traditions/Thames & Hudson, 1995), Pilgrimage: Looking at Ground Zero (powerHouse, 2002), Nepal 1975–2011 (Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press, 2014), Look into My Eyes: Nuevomexicanos por Vida, ’81–’83 (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2016), Legacy in Stone: Syria before War (powerHouse, 2018), Our Voices, Our Streets: American Protests 2001–2011 (powerHouse, 2020), and Nepal Earthquake (Himal Books, 2022). His Website is www.kevinbubriski.com.
About the Contributors
Tahir Hamut Izgil is a prominent modernist Uyghur poet, filmmaker, and activist who grew up in Kashgar, in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. He is recognized as one of the foremost poets writing in the Uyghur language. Additionally, he has directed numerous documentaries, music videos, advertisement campaigns, and feature films. Fearing persecution from Chinese authorities, he and his family sought asylum in the United States in 2017. His poetry has been translated into English, Japanese, Swedish, Turkish, and other languages. He is the current Chair of the World Uyghur Writers Union, and his book, Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, was featured on National Public Radio and The New York Times Book Review.
Dru C. Gladney (1950–2022) was Professor of Anthropology at Pomona College where he also served as President of the Pacific Basin Institute. Gladney was the author of more than 100 academic articles and book chapters on topics spanning the Asian continent, and his books include Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects (Chicago, 2004), Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality (Wadsworth, 2003), Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, China, Korea, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the U.S. (Stanford, 1998), and Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic (Harvard, 1991).
Slide Show
Praise
“The Uyghurs: Kashgar before the Catastrophe should stop you in your tracks. With its haunting narrative, evocative photographs, and poignant texts and poems, this volume illuminates and inspires. Perhaps most important: At a time when Chinese authorities seek to erase Uyghur identity, this book also preserves.”
—Sophie Richardson, China Director at Human Rights Watch and author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence
“The Uyghurs: Kashgar Before the Catastrophe, a powerful and important new book of photographs… captures a moment in time, when Kashgar was still intact as a cultural, historical and religious centre that was nevertheless moving into the modern world.”
—Sophie Beach, Mekong Review
“Bubriski’s photographs capture the Uyghurs’ cultural, economic, familial, religious, and spiritual traditions. The vibrancy, beauty, and grit of Kashgar and its people that Bubriski witnessed and photographed more 25 years ago has irrevocably changed, making his photographs even more significant.”
—Robert Gerhardt, from the interview with Bubriski in The Diplomat (pdf)
“Kevin Bubriski’s photographs capture a Kashgar before the Chinese government’s crackdown that is a window into humanity and tradition, a world that few of us got to know but many dream of. His photographs hold that dream like a fragile locket. With captivating texts and poetry by Tahir Hamut Izgil and a historical essay by Dru Gladney, this book can help one understand just how rich and filled with warmth, depth, and history this important and magical city once was. The Uyghurs is a testament to the resilience of Uyghurs whose voices, culture, and memory must carry on.”
—Lisa Ross, photographer and author of Living Shrines of Uyghur China
“We often associate photographs with a feeling of loss, since they present the illusion of connecting to a person, place, or time that we know is already gone. This sense of loss is amplified in Kevin Bubriski’s The Uyghurs: Kashgar before the Catastrophe, because the disappearances that were imposed on Uyghur communities since these images were made are so severe and so full of trauma. As Tahir Hamut Izgil attests in the story of his childhood in Kashgar, the persecution of Uyghurs was already taking place clandestinely while Bubriski’s vivid images of Uyghur life were being recorded on the street. Two realities: one seen, one kept hidden. Bringing the two together in this book serves as a reminder that there is always more to imagine than what meets the eye in a photograph. The loss is real, but so is the life.
—Carolyn Drake, photographer for Magnum and author of Two Rivers and Wild Pigeon
“Kevin Bubriski’s photographs offer a glimpse back into the ways and dreams of the people of Kashgar before the disasters of the twenty-first century. More than an echo of a vanished past, they suggest an alternative future: what it might look like for Uyghurs to live with dignity in the magnificent city they built themselves over the centuries.”
—James A. Millward, Professor of Inter-societal History at Georgetown University and author of The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction and Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang
“Kevin Bubriski’s images from Kashgar on the brink of the millennium are nothing short of fantastic. They achieve what every documentary photographer hopes to achieve: journalistic precision and visual poetry. They are less than a quarter of a century old but beautifully tell the story of a place like no other in Asia. On my repeated viewings, I was engulfed by a mix of emotions, from nostalgia of an ancient city I hold dear in my heart but could only visit too briefly to jealousy of not making such images during my first trip to the region, despair caused by looking at a rich heritage that has recently been destroyed to anger when thinking of the violence that many among these people had to go through in the last few years, many of them locked in Chinese reeducation camps. The Uyghurs is an important photographic testament to a place not so far away from us that is already long gone.”
—Patrick Wack, photographer and author of DUST
“Bubriski has a special skill in structuring images interestingly from front to back; this adds to the viewers’ discovery journey and viewing enjoyment. Excellent examples are the image of the children in the alley and the image of the assembled elders.
The photographs are printed very well on generously large pages. Some few are in color, which adds a bit of a contemporary touch. The layout is attractive and varied, making it a pleasure to view this photobook again and again. Particularly noteworthy is the section containing all the texts in the Uyghur language.”
—Gerhard Clausing, Photobook Journal
“Bubriski’s photos and Tahir’s words are a poignant tribute to a time, a place and a people. Holding the book is an aesthetic pleasure. Bubriski’s photographs are divided into four portfolios: Id-Kah Mosque, Afaq Khoja Mausoleum, and the People’s Square; the streets and alleyways of the Old City; Kashgar’s Bazaars; and its students and institutes of learning. The images are predominantly black and white, but each portfolio is book-ended by color images. The accompanying text is bilingual, translated from the Uyghur into English by the anonymous “M.A.” and Xinjiang scholar Darren Byler. This not only highlights the original composition in Uyghur, but also underscores that the book is about knowledge belonging to Uyghurs.”
—Henryk Szadziewski, China Books Review (read full review here)
My Place
In the remote mountainous terrain of the Spiti Valley of northwest India in the summer of 2018 a thirty-seven-year-old Spanish bicyclist, Javier, told me he had been riding the “asphalt river” all over Asia and Europe for twelve years. He remarked that from the bicycle seat he no longer saw or felt the difference between uphill or down, even in the extreme Himalayan landscape where we met. He said that curiosity drove him and informed him, that for him curiosity was the search for beauty. I’ve never traveled much by bicycle, but Javier’s words have stayed with me ever since.
I have been making photographs for more than fifty years, yet I still feel a sense of anticipation, excitement, and exploration when I pick up a camera. It is the curiosity to discover the world around me that energizes me both while afar and at home. Admittedly, I am a tourist in my own backyard. The landscape of home in Vermont is intimate, rural, farmed, and wooded, set among unintimidating forested mountains. The change of seasons brings a cyclical regularity to life along with renewed surprises of spring’s slow unveiling, outdoor life of summer, vibrant foliage color in fall, and austere monochrome elegance and hard-edge beauty of the white snow landscape of winter. Stepping into my backyard there are always discoveries.
At home in Vermont my place is the east-facing sunporch of our Vermont home. The sunporch is an open space, ten by twenty feet enclosed on three sides by single-pane glass. In summer the open windows let in the fresh air and bird and cricket sounds. Just outside the windows is a green world of thick leafy foliage with momentary specks of sunlight leaking through. In winter a small wood-burning stove takes the icy chill out of the sunporch. From the windows is a panorama of trees bare of their foliage, dark spindly silhouettes against the neighbor’s snow-covered pasture and the distant gentle rolling horizon of the Green Mountains, colorless and beautiful like a finely etched print. Just fifty feet from us is the neighbor’s corral with horses, Scottish highland cattle, and a few sheep and goats. Their bleats and vocalizations are welcome accents to the winter silence.
Forty-eight years earlier my place was a small lean-to space on the clay flat roof of Dul Bahadur Shahi’s house in Karki Bada village in Nepal’s far northwestern district of Mugu, an eight-days walk from the nearest motorable road. All my belongings lived in a backpack tucked among the large clay urns of grain from the fall harvest and bundles of fodder for the family’s cow. My space was without furniture and tiny but large enough for my sleeping bag and backpack and maybe a visitor or two. The rooftop was connected to more than ten other rooftops in an earthen sort of condominium arrangement where all the houses were well dug into the steep mountain hillside. Notched pine tree trunks were the ladders and public way for getting from one long strip of connected houses and their rooftops to the neighbors’ connected houses above.
When not at work on the drinking-water pipeline for the emerging town of Gumghadi a half hour walk away, I was on the roof in Karki Bada tutoring young students in English, answering the questions of village elders and playing with the youngsters. More than anything I listened to the elders’ stories of dukkha (suffering) in this region of extreme food deficits and infant mortality. As we all lived within shouting distance of each other I knew the distinct sound of each neighbor’s voice and the early morning sounds of chickens, cattle, and neighbors waking up. From the distant police check post next to the only drinking-water tap for the village wafted the electric crackle of devotional hymns, news, and folk songs on Radio Nepal. Evening brought the melodic sounds of the shepherds returning home in the descending darkness, calling to their cattle or herds of sheep. Sometimes at night the rooftops shook with the loud and earsplitting deep thump and snap of drums in the darkness, transforming neighbors into shamanic healers.
Behind my place in Nepal I looked above to the next rows of houses stacked upon each other, their horizontal roof and porch lines broken by the diagonals of more ladders made of notched pine tree trunks. Each family house had an individual front porch space. Like the deck of a ship all the porches were connected, and one could walk across several connected porches to get to the other side of the village. While the porch belonged to the family who owned the house, the porches were public as well. Morning hygiene, cleaning the baby, brushing teeth, and grooming hair before school time all took place on one’s porch. In front of me to the east, beyond the terraced fields and apricot trees spreading down from Karki Bada to Srinagar village, was the deep Mugu Karnali Valley. From the village’s rooftop life around me out to the snow-covered peaks several days walk up the Mugu Valley there was always a feast for my hungry eye.
Garry Winogrand said that he photographed “to find out what something will look like photographed.” Along with my own similar yearning to see the resultant photographic image, I also have the collector’s instinct of collecting and holding onto experiences and memories of people, objects, and places I’ve seen. It is a personal hunter/gather urge to go out to collect and bring back harvests of images. It is curiosity that drives my search for beauty, and photography is just my way of confirming the fruits of the search and sharing the found pieces of beauty as well.
Copyright © 2022 Kevin Bubriski. All rights reserved.