Raul Gutierrez is one of my favorite photographers. I particularly love his images of Tibetan life, like the Kham logging camp above. I've traveled to some of the same places, and Raul's work captures these scenes in a different way than my eyes remember. He says:
For the past fifteen years, I have been making pilgrimages to the deserts and mountains of China's western borders, focusing on Tibetan and Uyghur communities. These remote frontier regions are laced with contested geographies where religious and cultural legacies confront powerful economic and political transformations.
In these far away places, I look for way stations between cultures where one can see the past and future simultaneously. Seeing these changes over such a short time is a perspective that is at once disorienting and tragic. I try to make images that show these things, or at least some of the emotional truths behind them, because I know each time I return everything will be almost unrecognizable.
20×200 just released a collection of four 11×14 prints from his "Travels Without Maps" project. You can buy them as a set, or individually. Truly beautiful work. (thanks, Sara Distin)
