A photography trip with somebody better than you is a strange arrangement. You stand in the same places, in the same light, with much the same equipment, and at the end of the day you look at two different sets of pictures and have to work out why.
The week was led by William Chua, the same photographer who led the workshop I went on in Nepal. We started in Urumqi, where most of the street frames were made, and then drove — Kanas, Hemu village, the Ghost City, and Sayram Lake.
The portraits came first
The first frames of the trip are strangers, in the street, meeting the lens. Hard backlight, dust in the air, and people who knew they were being photographed and stayed anyway.
Asking is the whole technique, and the part nobody teaches you. A gesture at the camera, a pause, and then either a nod or a wave-off, both of which you accept immediately. The photographs that work are made in the seconds after the nod, before the person arranges their face.
They were not told where the photographs would end up. They agreed, there and then, to be photographed by a stranger with a camera, and nobody said the word website. That is the ordinary state of travel portraiture and it is better named than glossed over. Nobody here is identified, and if one of them asked me to take a frame down, it would come down.
North, into the colour
Then several days of driving, and larch turning in a way that lasts about a fortnight a year. Whole hillsides of it, with black spruce mixed in, so the slopes read as stripes rather than as a single colour.
One morning the mist came down and stayed, and the boardwalk through the trees turned into the only line in the picture. That frame took no skill at all beyond being outside at the right hour, which is most of landscape photography honestly described.
The bend everybody photographs
The bend is on the Kanas river. There is a viewing platform, a queue for it, and a photograph that already exists in a hundred thousand copies. You can refuse to take it, which is a kind of vanity, or take it and accept that you have added one more.
I took it. What I would look for next time is the frame five minutes’ walk from the platform, where the same river is doing the same thing without the railing in front of it.
What the week changed
What William presses on people is simple to say and hard to do: look at the light first, and photograph the emotion and the activity around you rather than the thing you came to see. In Xinjiang that mostly meant turning away from the view and looking at whoever was standing beside it.
What I noticed on my own, looking back at the take, is how many more frames I made of people than I usually do, and how much better the trip is for it. The valleys are handsome. The faces are the reason I would go again.
The full Xinjiang set is on SmugMug.