Vanishing Point

Patrick Wack’s Photographs of Xinjiang

by Patrick Wack
December 16, 2021

A building in Kashgar’s Old City, partially demolished as part of a government plan to raze and rebuild large sections of the city, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, May 2016.
Travelers board and exit the train to Hotan at the Kashgar railway station, May 2016. One railway links the cities and towns south of the Taklamakan desert, where most of the Uyghur community in Xinjiang lives.
Kashgar’s Old City, May 2016.
Men pray at a mosque in Kasghar’s Old City, May 2016.
A surveillance camera mounted above a broken fence overlooks a park in Urumqi, May 2016.
A clerk stands at the counter of a pharmacy in Kashgar’s Old City, May 2016.
A large statue of Mao Zedong overlooks People’s Square in Kashgar, May 2016.
A Uyghur man looks through the door of his house, out onto Ayding Lake, in the Turpan Depression, June 2016. The dried up lake is 505 feet below sea level, the lowest point in China.
A Han migrant worker fishes on a small lake alongside an abandoned construction project on the outskirts of Turpan, June 2016.
Rocky landscapes along the drive from Beitun in northern Xinjiang to Urumqi, the province’s capital, May 2017.
A crowd gathers to watch an event in Tuanjie (or “Unity”) Square, in Hotan, May 2016. A statue of the Uyghur farmer Kurban Tulum shaking hands with Mao Zedong stands in the middle of the square to commemorate their meeting, which the Chinese Communist Party promotes as a symbol of ethnic unity.
A senior technician for an oil exploration team at the China National Petroleum Corporation, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, takes a cigarette break after lunch near one of the company’s vehicles, in the Taklamakan Desert, December 2016.
The downtown area in Karamay, a city in northern Xinjiang that was developed alongside oil fields, May 2017.
Police officers train a police dog next to a police station in Qiemo county in southern Xinjiang, December 2016.
A Han migrant worker from eastern China makes a phone call above a construction site in Altay city, in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture, in far northern Xinjiang, May 2017.
A Uyghur seasonal worker stands in a cotton field in the last days of the harvest, in Luntai county, Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, between Korla and Kuqa, north of the Taklamakan desert, November 2016. Cotton is one of the largest agricultural industries in the province.
A guard stands on the road to Wuerhe, known as a “Ghost Town,” about 100 kilometers away from Karamay, November 2016.
Teenagers socialize after school at a park in the city of Shihezi in northern Xinjiang, May 2017.
A Muslim man prays at sunset on the shore of Saytam Lake, near the Kazakhstan border, May 2017.
Uyghur residents wait in line at an ID and body search checkpoint before entering the local bazaar, in Hotan, February 3, 2019.
Uyghur men walk down a commercial street near the Id Kah Mosque, in Kashgar’s Old City, January 31, 2019.
Kunlun Park, in Hotan, February 5, 2019.
A woman talks on the phone while walking down a street in Kashgar’s Old City, January 31, 2019.
Behind a row of motorized miniature tanks, tourists climb a sand dune in the Kumtag Desert Scenic Area, a park catering mostly to Han tourists, in Shanshan county, about 56 miles from Turpan, in eastern Xinjiang, September 28, 2019.
A group of Uyghur tourists holding People’s Republic of China flags visit the Kizil Gaha Beacon Tower, which was built during the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE), in Kuqa, October 2, 2019.

The French photographer Patrick Wack first traveled to Xinjiang in 2016. He had arrived in China a decade earlier, seduced by the idea of having a “ringside seat to history,” and found a steady stream of documentary and commercial work across the country. But several years into Xi Jinping’s tenure as China’s top leader, Wack found himself despairing of China’s “nationalist and revanchist” turn, mourning the hopes he had once held that he would get to witness the country’s political liberalization.

Craving a change of scenery and a desire to witness a region at the “crossroads” of history, in 2016 he set out on what would be the first of six trips to photograph China’s far western region of Xinjiang.

The pictures he made during those visits to Xinjiang between 2016 and 2019 document both the changes wrought by the government campaign of cultural and political repression of the region’s primarily Muslim ethnic minorities, and Wack’s own “brutal” realization that working in Xinjiang wouldn’t be the escape from China’s politics he had craved. Rather, as he writes in the introduction to Dust, a collection of 70 of his photographs along with essays by Xinjiang scholars Dru Gladney and Rémi Castets and former China Bureau Chief for Le Monde Brice Pedroletti, “I had left a territory under surveillance only to return to find an open-air prison. The landscape had changed; it had been stripped of the slightest religious or cultural symbol. The mosques were locked shut, the women divested of their veils, the domes and the crescents had vanished, the Uyghur villages seemed uninhabited and bouquets of surveillance cameras had blossomed everywhere.”

Shortly before the book’s publication, Kodak published a selection of Wack’s photographs on its Instagram account, only to remove them and apologize for the post when a storm of criticism from Chinese social media users and prominent government-backed media outlets attacked the post and Wack, accusing him of fabricating human rights violations for the sake of publicity and profit.

The incident was just one small victory for Beijing in its onslaught of efforts to obstruct accurate coverage of Xinjiang. Wack’s photos became a target because they open a window into the region that Chinese leaders prefer to keep shut.

—The Editors

Topics:

Media, Politics, Religion, Society

Keywords:

Xinjiang, Uighur, Photography, Surveillance