Interview: Carolyn Drake

From the series Wild Pigeon © Carolyn Drake

Carolyn Drake is a photographer working globally on personal projects and assigned commissions. Between 2007 and 2013, she pursued two long term projects in Central Asia. The first – Two Rivers – explores the shifting borders, histories and life systems in the geographic spaces between Afghanistan, Iran, Russia and China. The second project, Wild Pigeon, is an amalgam of photographs, drawings, embroidery and texts made in Uyghur areas of western China. It explores the boundaries of photography while telling the story of a culture being disrupted and reshaped.

Carolyn is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, the Lange Taylor Documentary Prize, and a World Press Photo award among others. In 2013, she relocated from Istanbul, Turkey to Water Valley, Mississippi to begin a new body of work.

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From the series Wild Pigeon © Carolyn Drake

fototazo: In your new project Wild Pigeon you experiment much more with how you approach presenting visual material than you have in the past, including having your subjects draw over your images or use them as materials for collage as well as exploring video and audio interviews with your subjects. In your statement on the project, you state it was in response to "Feeling the limits of my own viewpoint."

Why, at this point in your career and with this particular project, do you think that you came up against the feeling of those limits? Is your feeling based in the specifics of this project, a changed understanding of the limits of photography more broadly, or some of both?

Carolyn Drake: With this project I found myself trying to tell a story about people who are forbidden from describing themselves to the broader world in their own ways; who speak a different language than me and have different religious and intellectual experiences; and who live in a place that is changing rapidly, not by their own choice. I had to ask myself how to make meaningful work considering all of these conditions. The experiments were a response to these deliberations.

I found myself looking at historical writings and photographs of the region while I was making the work. There was very little material created by Uyghurs and quite a bit created by people trying to colonize Uyghurs. That seemed like a problem. It seemed important to try to bring Uyghur perspectives into the work.

I decided also that when it comes down to it, for me photography is an exchange, and the work should reflect that. The collages and sketches were a way to bring Uyghurs into the creative process and create a kind of visual dialogue between us. The meaning, if there is any, lies at the intersection of our views.

f: You've recently turned your project Two Rivers into a self-published book with the writer Elif Batuman and the book designer Sybren Kuiper. I believe this is your first time working in a collaborative effort. How did doing so inform your own understanding of your working methods and your photographs?

CD: I often work with magazines where there are many collaborators, but this was my first time working with collaborators who are independent artists. They each interpreted the work using their own methods – Syb using the materials of a designer and Elif those of a writer. Maybe it was opening that door to collaboration and to mixing mediums that led me to the visual experiments in the Wild Pigeon project.

From the series Wild Pigeon © Carolyn Drake

f: For those considering self-publishing, what did you learn from the process, perhaps that you wish that you had known before you started, that you might share with them?

CD: I learned that you can't rush a book, that they are extremely expensive to produce, that there is a global audience for photobooks, that mistakes can be beautiful.

f: What have you come to see as the strengths and limitations of the photobook as a vehicle for photographic work generally after having created this project?

CD: Books are not about one single image, they are about the collection of images folded and sized and sequenced and printed for effect. Unlike an exhibition, it's easy to return to a book for multiple readings. Books are less temporal and more intimate and more accessible to a geographically dispersed audience than an exhibition, and more physically tangible than a website. I guess the main limitation I can see is size. You can't stand back and behold and be overwhelmed by a photobook the way you can an exhibition that covers the walls of a room. You could say that books are more interactive. The reader navigates the work.

f: Take us out shooting with you. If we were there with you as you photographed, what would we see? How do you move, interact and work through photographing a situation?

CD: I'm persistent, quiet, always looking around. I'll spend ten minutes with the camera to my eye and then step back to consider another perspective. I listen a lot and ask a lot of questions, but then try to find a way to let people carry on. I spend a lot of time waiting, questioning myself, revising plans, trying to remain flexible. I've seen my approach changing lately, though. I've started thinking more conceptually, especially with my latest project in Ukraine, sketching out ideas in advance. But I like to remain open to chance still. There's something about the unexpected moment that I think I will always be drawn to.

From the series Wild Pigeon © Carolyn Drake

f: You've created work located in a range of concrete spaces – Ukraine, Central Asia, New York City, and now you're now living in Mississippi and working on a project there.  Do you think that the movement every few years is a vital part of your working process in terms of keeping inspiration present and your vision acute? Are you ever tempted to begin to divide one location through a string of projects created there instead of multiplying the different spaces you have worked in?

CD: I don't actually view these movements as jumping from place to place every few years. It's more of a progression of one thing leading to another. The work I did in New York led to Ukraine which led to Central Asia. I actually spent seven years working in Central Asia, not exactly a short amount of time. That said, yes, I have worked in a broad range of concrete spaces over the last ten years, and I think Two Rivers consciously pushed that idea, that feeling of movement, travel and flow. I'm not sure yet whether the next work I do back in the US will have the same feel. That work is still in the very early stages.

f: This is a business question: you've had a lot of success working in the editorial market, a market that many say is losing its ability to offer a living. Is that an impression that you share? How have you been able to develop your presence as an editorial photographer and how have you been able to establish and maintain strong working relationships with photo editors and writers?

CD: Most likely, I get editorial work because I make personal work. I would feel frustrated and constricted if I only did assignments. I like shifting between the two. Assignments often put me in situations that I wouldn't have chosen myself, but end up providing ideas and experiences that feed into my other work, and whatever money I make doing editorial work goes straight back into personal work. I have a few other ways to make ends meet besides the editorial jobs: occasional workshops, lectures, print sales. Writer relationships: extremely valuable. We share ideas and commiserate and challenge each other.

From the series Wild Pigeon © Carolyn Drake

f: A second question on working in editorial photography in relationship to your "personal" work. Ultimately it's a question about how a photographer maintains control over their personal presence in their work.

If we assume all work somehow reflects the self – through showing our viewpoint, ways of seeing, cropping and selecting of compositions as well as objects and people of importance – personal work affords us the space to allow for that self to be seen very presently. I understand that a lot of editorial work and editors themselves demand a more limited perceived self so that the subject can be seen first instead of the photographer. How do you navigate the varying requirements for presence of self between the two different ends of your images?

CD: Thats a keen observation. I enjoy seeing my work published in magazines, but I don't see it as a reflection of me. Editors often edit my work differently than I would. Some editors consult me when deciding which images to use and some don't. I am almost never involved in choosing the title that prints across the image that opens a magazine story. That's just how the editorial world works. But I can pull some personal images out of these assignments and use them in my own way later. Or if not, I just view it as a job, an adventure, an experience. It becomes difficult when the story feels like its aiming to fit into a template or fulfill a stereotype. Then I struggle to find a way to push the story in another direction and hope that the editor appreciates that. I try to avoid jobs that expect melodrama and cliché. Sometimes that's wishful thinking, and more and more I think there's something to be said for celebrating cliché, or at least acknowledging and repurposing it.

f: In your biography you state that you're interested in "the ways that history and reality are purposefully shaped, revised and re-imagined over time." What types of conclusions or current thoughts do you have in your investigation of those interests in terms of the malleability of history and reality? To what extent can they be shaped? How and by whom? What is photography's role in that process?

CD: I grew up at the end of the Cold War. There was a lot of fear of the Soviet Union and nuclear war, this distant enemy that was a constant topic of conversation, but nobody really knew. When I turned 30 after 9/11, there was a new war and a new enemy, but as I saw it, the same kinds of storytelling codes were used to describe them as during in the Cold War. I felt manipulated, I wanted to find ways to think about the world that resisted and defied these polarizing and politically manipulative stories.

I remember reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf in college. It's presented as a biography, but is actually a piece of fiction, inspired by real people. You see the gender of one character invented and reinvented over and over as you move through time. I found it compelling, a work that takes these seemingly fixed presumptions about gender, and presents them as fluid. And it blurs the line between fiction and history to the point where they become wholly intertwined.

Politicians, courts, laws, economists, doctors, teachers, journalists, scientists and authors shape perceptions of reality, and so do artists. Photographs can be part of any of their narratives. I'm drawn to the moments and places where these narratives and their authors are shifting, puzzling, ambiguous.

From the series Wild Pigeon © Carolyn Drake

f: Can you tip your hand as to what you're working on in Mississippi? How has it been to be working in the US after many years abroad in terms of the types of issues you are considering, the logistics and realities of making your images and your overall approach to making work?

CD: Each place has its own challenges. In the US I'm no longer dealing with a language barrier, but there are a lot of people who are anxious about their image and how it will be presented. And there is a lot of mental baggage I carry around with me that I struggle to shove off as I work and edit. My new work will not be limited to Mississippi, but I find that it is a good place to live to be able to keep seeing the US as an outsider. I like to feel like I'm viewing things from the edge, not from the center.

How Do We Understand a Photograph?

© Irina Rozovsky

What is the psychological process through which we understand a photograph?

This simple, straight question would require a doctoral thesis to consider fully and I have a few other obligations during the next three years and I'm sure you do too, but that shouldn't prevent us from meditating generally on the question as photographers.

The education of the eye plays a large role in how we understand an image; this post is an exploration of how a photographer who has had formal education and/or learned through experience in the field might understand a photograph. This overlaps in many ways with the way anyone understands an image, but also has its particularities as we will see.

This process of understanding is mutable, subjective, image-dependent and varies according to what number beer you're on; what follows is an outline exploring one possible way that the different ingredients in the process might come together to bring an understanding. I've broken it down into four parts: recognition of the image and physiological reaction; starting analysis; finding subtle relationships and analytical conclusions; and meaning. As a conclusion I talk about why and how we might undermine this process as photographers.

Why talk about this? This type of examination can help us in critiques as teachers, fellow students, friends or reviewers. It can also give us a way to think about making our own work: looking at how we understand images can allow us to borrow ideas from others, identify problems with and improve our own work and also manipulate the process of understanding to our benefit.

This post complements and builds from a post called Considering a Photograph written last year.

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WHOLE IMAGE RECOGNITION
Look at the lead image by Irina Rozovsky from her project One to Nothing for a few seconds. At the moment of looking at it, do you see the entire image all at once?

To clarify this question, I'll loosely reference a similar question asked by Jorge Luis Borges in his essay "An Investigation of the Word" about language and impress you by referencing Borges at the same time.

Do you understand this sentence as an entirety as you read it?

Or do you understand it in clusters: Do you understand / this sentence / as an entirety / as you read it?

Or do you understand it in individual parts, word-by-word as you go along: Do / you / understand / this / sentence / as / an / entirety / as / you / read / it?

And if the sentence is much shorter - "I must go" - or longer (I'll spare you), how does that impact the process of how you understand it?

To bring this question back to photographs and to Rozovksy's image, in the first fraction of a second upon seeing the image, we first attempt to recognize the entire "sentence" - that is to say the whole image - as opposed to first looking in detail at each "word" (a hoof, a rock, a fabric on the camel's back). We have an innate drive for immediate whole image recognition as a first part of understanding an image. We want to have a sense of the whole before we spend a minute looking at the hoof (barring prior use of hallucinogens).

How we get to that recognition has variables. We'll discuss a few to get the idea. One is density. If the image is low density like this image by Rozovksy - we can most likely understand it as a whole directly. We can read the whole sentence and understand it all at once, as we might with "I must go."

© Carolyn Drake

In a denser image with more parts to it, such as this photograph above by Carolyn Drake from her series "Two Rivers," we would be more likely to achieve whole image recognition in a different way. Instead of being able to recognize it immediately in the initial glance at the photograph, instead we would be more likely to rapidly look around the image and create in our mind a series of groupings or "clusters" that we then use to recognize the whole. This is a process that takes on the order of a second or two. We see the three figures on the left and the painting above them as a cluster; the central swimmer and those paintings above as a second; the torch and Olympic rings painting on the right and the boy climbing out of the pool as the third. Our eyes bounce around for a moment until we construct a whole from these clusters.



A second variable is image size and/or our distance from the image, both of which relate directly to density. Here on the screen, at this average size, the images fit in our visual field and density is compacted, but not too much. We can look at the two photographs we've considered and achieve whole image recognition either directly or by clusters, but in either case fairly immediately.

Seeing these same images at 100 inches square on a wall, however, the process of recognition changes. If an image overwhelms our visual field, we're much more inclined to construct the whole image from clusters than to see the whole immediately. In fact, if the image becomes large enough, we probably would need to look at the individual constituent parts that make up the clusters to recognize the photograph. Going back to our analogy with reading a sentence, recognition via constituent parts would be the equivalent to understanding a sentence word-by-word.

Similarly, a very small image, like Drake's image at 100 pixels wide below, can also affect the process of recognition. Ironically, it also makes it more likely we will need to rely on clusters or their constituent parts to recognize it. We try to pick out what we can - the central figure perhaps, the pool, the guy on the left - and then draw conclusions of what the image is of.

A third variable is tonality. Images with a very collapsed range of tonality - think of the text images from Amy Elkins' "Black Is the Day, Black Is the Night" (example below) - create more likelihood of coming to a recognition of the whole through clusters or perhaps even by the constituent parts that make up a cluster. Seeing the whole is rendered difficult by the tonal range.

There's a question of image reading that I'm undecided on that I would like to insert somewhere and here seems as good of a place as any. People say images are read left to right in our culture as with text and from right to left in countries like Israel where text reads in that direction. This competes with another idea that I won't try to engage here, one of visual hierarchies which states that we would see a big, pure red blotch, let's say, before a small gray one, or a face before feet. I'm not sure how those two – directional reading and visual hierarchies – relate, but I believe both ideas are important and relate to this first phase of recognizing an image.

There are other variables we could surely include, but I think the point is made: our initial drive upon seeing an image is to have whole image recognition; how we arrive there depends on variables. We take the path of least work. If we can see the image all at once and immediately, we do so. Other times we need to build a recognition via clusters or, if that fails, look at the constituent parts of an image. Regardless, the initial drive upon seeing an image and the first step to understanding an image is to recognize the whole.

© Amy Elkins

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PHYSIOLOGICAL REACTION
Another immediate element of seeing an image is physiological. An image of a murder scene causes one reaction, porn another. A camel in a desert dries my mouth, an image of a pool makes me feel cooler, especially in the heat wave we're currently in. I am not sure if we feel something bodily before we come to recognize the image as described above, or if the physiological reaction can come before recognizing what we are looking at. I think it's the latter. We have a visceral reaction to blood, for example, as soon as it hits our eyes and before we recognize the whole image. Regardless, I would say that both belong together in this first phase of understanding an image.

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STARTING ANALYSIS
When we recognize the image as a whole, the next step in understanding an image is not just seeing what it is, but how it's built. We shift from reaction to analysis. We go back and look at the clusters again, and then at their constituent parts. Once we recognize the image, we investigate. The process begins to become more verbal, an inner dialogue about the image develops. As we see these parts, we name them and make basic visual relationships.

Take a look at the first cluster on the left of Drake's image, for example. We see that there are three people. A fence that's mostly out of focus. A lane line. Lots of white and - hey look! - the reds and yellows in the lane line repeat in the wall painting above.

We also begin to see basic latent structures and geometries. This is probably one place in the process where photographers separate from others in terms of our process of understanding images. There are patterns of squares, circles, triangles that begin to pop out at us through our history of looking at images and training.

In Drake's photograph we see triangles:



Squares:



And geometries and structures in two-dimensional images aren't just two-dimensional; in this image we can tease out three-dimensional forms as well, like this pyramid:

Looking back to Irina Rozovsky's image, there’s a central triangle:

And lots of little triangles as well as lines of thirds through the image:

We could also understand the image as a series of boxes:

Or as circles:

Concurrent to this process of recognizing the geometry and structure of the photograph, we begin creating some initial questions and beliefs about the photograph. For example, where the fuck is the camel's head? The legs look like human legs in a burlap bag. It's a square, medium format, film photograph. Look at the incredible range of fabrics that make up the saddle! We also notice more details amongst the parts. What's that yellow brick wall back there doing or separating? And is that a second built wall slightly behind it?

The second phase, to summarize, is about the shift from an initial reaction to the photograph to exploring how the image is built in terms of technique and form; the beginnings of analysis of content through asking questions and stating initial beliefs about the image; and a further investigation of constituent parts or details.

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FINDING SUBTLE RELATIONSHIPS AND ANALYTICAL CONCLUSIONS
We begin to find and analyze more complex, subtle relationships as we spend more time with the image. Look, for example, at how the body of the central figure on the starting block is a square that's the same shape and size as the door behind him in Drake's image. Look also at the hands of the people in the left half of the frame, especially the hand of the blurred man in the foreground and that of the woman outside the pool. Look at how their gestures connect them visually. Their gestures also echo in the boy's hand in the water below the woman and in the painted swimming figure above them. Like 16th-century Mannerist paintings that rely on hand gestures to communicate interior states of being, all of the figures in this cluster convey a gestural motion of action and they work together to give Drake's image movement.

With further exploration we see the symmetry of the two red torch and Olympic rings paintings on either side of the image, a symmetry repeated in the two painted female swimmers in the center above the figure standing on the starting block, and then discover how all of this symmetry is playing against the odd figure swimming horizontally to the left of the two women reaching upwards. There's a central formal disruption of the image's symmetry by this horizontal swimmer that's important to its success.

In addition, the underlying tensions and the balance of the image is both understood as well as viscerally felt with extended time. We both recognize and feel the relative air and space around the central swimmer and begin to sense the importance of how Drake has loaded the edges of the image. There's an accumulation of objects on the left and right edges; on the left the blurred man and the painting on the wall behind him create a lot of weight on that side, which is balanced by the pinching of the number on the last starting block, the second pinched form above it and the pinning down of the upper right corner by the joist and rafter joint. The weight on the left edge and the three points of pinching on the right edge create a delicate stability and elevate the dynamic feel of the image.

We also begin conclusions on what we're seeing. Questions that arose earlier are decided upon. In Rozovsky's image, for example, given the lack of blood or trauma and the body's upright position, we conclude that the camel's head must be tucked to the side and that part of the image's strength is the angle Rozovsky chose to give the illusion of the camel as headless. On the question of the presence of a second yellow wall in the background of Rozovsky's image, the line begins to feel too straight to be natural and we conclude it's clearly man-made. While the line is very smooth to the left, it's more granular to the right in the same way as the bricks or stones in the wall closer to us. It ultimately feels inconclusive, however, and while there is evidence it could be a second wall, it may also be perhaps a path of some kind.

To continue with the section summaries, the third stage is an appreciation of more complex and more subtle formal dynamics within the image and the start of conclusions on the questions raised earlier. More questions will arise (and be answered) as viewing continues, but here is when we begin to see a number of conclusions.

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MEANING
Finally, we begin to think about and associate the image beyond itself, the last step of understanding an image for ourselves. To create an example, look at how the boy on the left in the water could also be the same boy on the right leaving the pool. Same age, hair, body type. It could be viewed as an entering and a leaving, a play with time and space; it could be a moving from the sea to land or from risk to safety.

What's more, the central younger man could be this boy but older, now grown into his body, the boy(s) in the image will become this man. Taking it a another logical step, maybe the central figure, now in the full strength of his body, will become the man on the left in the foreground, who appears to be a slightly older man, maybe 40. He is past his physical prime, looking back across time to see himself on the starting block, then back further in time to see himself as the boy in the pool. By making this man almost anonymous via the aggressive crop and by leaving him out of focus, Drake makes it easier for this vision back across time to not only be his, but ours.



If we really wanted to work this idea further, we could include the woman as the starting point for this man's life, a stand-in for his mother and his birth. We end up with life's cycle:

We associate this interpretation of the image with the stages of man riddle of the Sphinx or with Shakespeare's seven ages of man monologue from As You Like It. We begin to build an argument, to make a comment in class and we might eventually use these ideas to write an article or book. Another observer might use the land to sea idea for a separate interpretive departure, another might build one based in gender or class or representations of sports. This ascription of meaning through interpretive argument is what art is about in the end. You can build a really fantastic image of incredible geometries and detail, but if that's all it ultimately offers, it's not nutritive for long. We give it a moment and move on, it doesn't fill us. Ultimately it's the work that gives us a lot to build meaning from that sustains, like these three images by Rozovsky, Drake, and Elkins.

This fourth and final stage of understanding a photograph, to recap, is finding the meaning of the photograph for ourselves. We may reshape our interpretations over time. The work of art reflects our ever evolving life experience and knowledge. We use our ideas around its meaning to feed the arguments and conversations around the work of art that extend out from our own personal search for its meaning to interact with the searches of others.

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© Carolyn Drake

UNDERMINING UNDERSTANDING
In a matter of minutes, we have moved from trying to recognize the image through a series of steps to arrive at our interpretations of meaning in the image, moving through the full circle of understanding a photograph.

As I stated at the outset, this type of examination of the process of understanding an image can help us in looking at the work of others and also at our own work. To extend the conversation as to how it might help our own work as a form of conclusion, great photography frequently undermines and knowingly plays with this process of understanding we've just outlined. A photographer might purposefully manipulate tone, scale, or as in the case of the image by Drake above, gravity in order to frustrate our analysis of the image. They might choose how to place the frame in order to confuse our understanding of the image or to surprise us, such as in this Mark Powell image below. These types of plays with the process of understanding trap us in the image, putting us in mental loops that complicate - in the best possible way - our reading of it.

© Mark Powell

As a final example of how a photographer might undermine the process of understanding to create a strong photograph, he or she might make a photograph that works with a very slow process of revelation which encourages extended looking by bringing us continued rewards. For example, I looked at Rozovsky's image of the camel 50 times before I saw the figure in the background who in tone and texture blends into the distant rocks, confirming it's some sort of path back there.

These loops that trap us into looking and the continued giving of more with extended looking enrich the viewing experience by creating layers of revelation, dimensionality and an ongoing sense that we'll find more if we only stay looking at it just a little bit longer. These are just a few ways we can strengthen our work by exploring and subverting the process how we understand a photograph

Review: Carolyn Drake's "Two Rivers"

This review is written by Adam Bell, a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn, and will also be published on his excellent photo book review site.

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As organisms dependent on water, it seems axiomatic to highlight its importance. Rivers form the lifeblood of any region or community. Their waters are not merely a source of sustenance for the people, plants and animals, but also a vital and sustaining resource for the local culture and traditions. Once a vibrant region, nourished by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, Central Asia was dramatically transformed when the two rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation by the former Soviet Union. While some areas prospered as cotton became widespread, there were also losers in this agricultural transformation. Once lush agricultural provinces were transformed, new resources were discovered, traditional farming and fishing was increasingly marginalized, lives were irrevocably altered and the massive Aral Sea all but dried up. Carolyn Drake’s new book, Two Rivers, explores the lingering effects of empire and the persistent evolution of culture and religion in the face of these profound changes with grace and beauty.

Divided into eight sections, the book offers a broad and varied look at the region. Guided by the rivers and water, the book begins at the Aral Sea and makes it way through the landscape of Central Asia, visiting countries like Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan among others. Vast and difficult to contain, Central Asia has a rich history, and along with Afghanistan, its southern neighbor, has not only formed a cultural bridge between Asia, the Middle East and Europe, but has also functioned as a geopolitical buffer, pawn and stage for numerous empires. Clear-cut ethnic and cultural boundaries long blurred and crossed are no less clear as the countries struggle to define themselves culturally and politically in the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Syncretic religious practices thrive and coexist with institutionalized religion and porous borders leave the often-autocratic governments struggling to maintain control. Developed over the course of six years and numerous journeys to the region, the book offers a nuanced and evocative approach that eschews easy answers or trite reductions.

The book opens with taxidermy specimens from the history museum of Aralsk, a former fishing port on the Aral Sea. The solemn parade of animals, propped against walls or confined to glass cases or jars, signals an elegiac look to the landscape’s past. Displaced and set against the drab interior of a crumbling museum, the frozen and preserved animals offer an idealized capsule of nature that has likely long since disappeared from the landscape. Similarly displaced and forced to adapt to a new landscape, the people throughout the book struggle to maintain traditions that have faded or simply evolved to their new reality – new deserts, rivers diverted and cities starved of once vital natural resources. In one image a tree stands confused and defiant as a river rages around its base – forging a new path forward, racing towards something.

The region’s rich cultural traditions and complex political reality, both past and present, are skillfully presented through readily found contradictions. A ubiquitous oversized head of Lenin, buried in some backroom, is presented alongside a Mesopotamian frieze. A woman shrouded in a floral veil poses against a dramatically lit background and is juxtaposed with a headless statue whose raised arms appear to conjure an explosion of cherry blossoms – a fleeting glimpse of hope. Unlike some work in the region that seems to delight in the visuals of post-Soviet decay, Drake finds moments of levity, joy and mystery while still acknowledging the reality of her subject’s lives and surroundings. Women laugh over a bottle of vodka and young children play in an old swimming pool or by the side of a river. In another image, a young man sits in a café. Seen through a window, the fractured reflections of the chaotic city frame his quiet and pensive face. Throughout the book, Drake makes wonderful use of color and light in her images. Her carefully composed images exhibit a casual ease that belies her mastery of medium.

Designed by Syb Kuiper, the book itself is a confounding, intriguing and brilliant object. Jutting out of the slightly smaller cloth-bound cover, the pages and images seem like they can barely be contained, or as Drake notes, they end abruptly “just like the rivers themselves now end before they reach the Aral Sea.” The images also often spill over the uncut Japanese bound pages breaking up into a staccato like rhythm of color and form. Although the design frustrates any direct viewing of many of the images, it also forces you to slow down and digest the fragmented photographs – moving back and forth between individual pages. Secured to the book with a rubber band is a small pamphlet containing a short essay by the writer Elif Batuman and notes by Drake. Whereas Batuman offers a wonderful essay on the work, Drake’s notes offer unique details about each image, section and sequence. Self-published and funded through a successful Kickstarter campaign, Two Rivers represents the best possibilities of self-publishing – marrying uniquely powerful and evocative work within a striking, unorthodox and beautiful form.