aWANTEDmag.com, Inc

Whether as a child or during the first part of your career, who or what were your earliest artistic influences?

My earliest influence as a child was my mother. She was a painter and made beautiful portraits; she was a perfectionist. She used the camera to photograph her subjects and would then paint for hours. Through her I learned to see. At 12 she handed me her

35mm, I looked though the lens and fell in love, I knew that was it. A few years later I saw my first photography exhibit, it was Weegee, then Diane Arbus’s work. Ralph Eugene Meatyard and Roy DeCarava were all people whose work moved me the most early on. There was an intensity and a haunting quality in all of their work. These influences have all carried through. In fact my greatest teachers were photography books.

After observing and photographing the graves and shrines erected in the deserts of Northwest China, what do you think the relationship is between the “art” and the earth it stands on?

The desert is the earth, site and location for this spiritual expression. The desert holds a history of importance for the visionary, the prophet, the seeker, the artist. The shrines themselves are in a sense a collective form of art/sculpture. They are manifestations of faith. The desert insists that the “makers” return to repair and maintain the presence of ones faith. The Saint’s who are buried at the sites live forever. They are known to never die.

The earth holds them and the people buried near them.

Even though you are based in New York, you have traveled all over the world to exotic locations. Do you find that your creative direction is dictated by the distant lands you visit?

For many years I found my creative inspiration here at home. I was influenced by many photographers before me, photographing only my own community, family and clan. It was only 10 years ago that I began to leave this country and make work with an awareness of how challenging a task it would be to make authentic work in a place I did not know as home. The desert offers something unique.
                                   
It is a place I feel at home. When I am there, I am led. I believe in the artist as visionary. I never think of the destination as exotic, for exotic to one man is another man’s home. A friend that I have traveled with grew up in this region. Her father asked me where my country was and was the standard of living different than his life. They did not have running water, he had few teeth. So to him I was possibly exotic.

Along with your large color photographs, why did you choose to also document the shrines using video?

From the very first moment I was in a holy site I thought how can I really share this with others. I wanted to share the meditative quality and the sound of the wind and the flags blowing. The video is very meditative and simple. One shrine is shown at a time for a few minutes. As a viewer all you can do is sit and watch it, letting time pass. That is what it is like to be there. You just sit and watch and pray or meditate in front of the site, there in the middle of the desert with the wind and the sand and the sound of the flags blowing.
 
You collaborated with a local scholar enabling you to visit many of the holy sites in China. How did you see your role in relationship to the surroundings -- did you feel like a onlooker or over time, did you develop a different type of bond with the structures and the land you were visiting?

From the first time I walked into a holy site I felt pulled in, connected and overwhelmed. There was an expression of being human that I was captured by. Perhaps it was both the need to create and divine inspiration. My role from the beginning was to create images inspired by the cloth and wooden architecture as it emerged from the earth be it sand or oasis.

I have worked with two scholars and three students over seven years. Through them I learned what I was looking at. Through me they learned to see much more intently.

One scholar is French, a young historian of Central Asian Islam. The other, is Uyghur and she was born in this region. To this day it remains a miracle that we were all brought together. In fact she wrote the hagiography we used to locate the holy sites. It was her PhD work. She and her students, also Uyghur, were desperately trying to preserve whatever culture they could as things are changing rapidly. My connection to the holy sites was immediate but my vision changed over time, it matured.

Lastly, how do you think culture (American or otherwise) and landscape is conveyed through your work?

In Xinjiang culture is literally expressed in the landscape. It is embedded in the landscape. The flags and materials all made by hand and the care with which these objects are erected and maintained, are symbolic of impermanence and survival. The images are a preservation of a history and the ways in which that narrative is inextricably linked to the land.