Turks in China collage debuts
After years spent photographing a society of Turks living in the remote western frontier of China, Carolyn Drake had a portfolio honest enough for publication in a 2009 National Geographic.
But she wanted to push the portfolio beyond documentary and into art. So she took her printed images to the people in the pictures, along with colored pencils, scissors and glue, then asked her subjects to mark them up, cut them out, write messages over the images and re-create them any way they saw fit.
The resulting 32 photo collages form “Carolyn Drake: Wild Pigeon,” the inaugural exhibition in a gallery dedicated to recent acquisitions by the Department of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The gallery is conveniently located next to the museum coffee bar, and “Wild Pigeon” should be the first stop when freshly caffeinated.
Drake’s study of the Uighur (pronounced Weegur) people is not something that can be appreciated in passing. The images take some effort on the part of the viewer because the point is to blur the line of “who is in control of telling the story,” says Drake, 46, a graduate of Brown University who recently settled in Vallejo.
The Uighurs are a Muslim civilization with their own Carolyn Drake, above, photographed the Uighurs, Turkish Muslims living in China, who put their marks on the pictures, right. language and culture that isolates them from the surrounding Chinese. Drake came upon them after spending a year in Ukraine on a Fulbright scholarship. She headed farther east by bus and crossed the border from Kyrgyzstan into China by foot.
“I knew there would be Turkish people there,” she says. “What surprised me was to find a seemingly self-sustained agricultural community that felt vibrant. They were nonindustrialized.”
Drake continued on to industrialized Istanbul, where she lived for six years while working as a freelance feature photographer. Whenever she got a break, she would make the six-hour flight to spend a month or so with the Uighurs. She made 10 trips, and was arrested and interrogated just once by national police. She got off by insisting she was just a tourist — though her images are not what a tourist might shoot.
Drake took a lot of care to ensure that her photos did not portray the Uighurs as medieval, and she was sensitive to issues of control inherent in documentary photography.
“I wanted to resist making stereotype images that made these people look primitive,” she says.
Her attempt to put the Uighur voice to her photos started with a tape recorder. But she did not get far with that. The Uighurs were afraid to talk. They were unafraid, however, to mark up the pictures. Drake exhibited these collaborative artworks at a photography fair in London two years ago. Curator Clement Cheroux saw them and purchased them after he got the job as senior curator of photography at SFMOMA.
This is the museum premiere of “Wild Pigeon,” and to fill the new gallery, the 32 collages are complemented by nine unaltered images. On the floor is a collage of handembroidered Turkish rugs that reference “Wild Pigeon,” a short story written by a Uighur that the show is titled after. People are invited to walk on this art, sit on it or lie on it, in order to discover words embroidered into the rugs.
“By bringing these elements together, I’m trying to create a kind of storytelling that is — like the world — tactile, puzzling and multifaceted,” says Drake. “It’s an attempt to let go of some of my own control over the images and introduce voices of people who have been stereotyped and silenced by outsiders.” Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art