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1 of 27The following photographs were taken in 2007 - 2011. A preserved Aral Sea bream on view at a permanent exhibition in the History Museum in Aralsk as a memorial to the life that once thrived in and around the Aral Sea. Aralsk, KazakhstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
2 of 27A wild goose on view at the Aralsk History Museum. Aralsk, KazakhstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
3 of 27Rusting fishing boats at a former fishing port on the Aral Sea. Moynaq, UzbekistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
4 of 27A Soviet era swimming pool in Mary. Irrigation projects during Soviet times turned this oasis city into a center for cotton production. Mary, TurkmenistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
5 of 27A lighting fixture in a home in Damla, a desert village where people live off rain water collected in communal ponds. Electricity comes from generators. Damla, TurkmenistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
6 of 27A cotton farmer in his orange Moskovich. Shege, UzbekistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
7 of 27Peeling wallpaper at an abandoned check point near the Uzbek/Turkmen border. between Dashogus and Dargan Ata, TurkmenistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
8 of 27The Syr Darya, an irrigation canal, and cotton fields seen through an airplane window in spring. Tashkent, UzbekistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
9 of 27A history museum is undergoing renovation.Shakhrisabz, UzbekistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
10 of 27A window is open in the photographer's hotel room. Zhetisay, KazakhstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
11 of 27A man stands in a shower that sprays water from all sides. It is one of several treatments that patients go through during the course of a day at Zhetisay Sanatorium. Mineral Water, KazakhstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
12 of 27Bullet holes and stars are lit at night in Damla, a desert village whose name means "Drop of Water." Damla, TurkmenistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
13 of 27The imprint of a swimmer on the muddy shore of the Syr Darya in summer. Kyzylorda, KazakhstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
14 of 27A donkey brays near an irrigation canal in a cotton farming village named after the Uzbek president. Karimov, UzbekistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
15 of 27A border town in the Fergana Valley. Karasu, KyrgyzstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
16 of 27Smoke and people fill the park of Khudayar Khan’s palace to celebrate Nowruz, the new year and beginning of spring, on March 21. Kokand, UzbekistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
17 of 27Khujand – a 2500-year-old city in the Fergana Valley – viewed through split window panes in a dilapidated hotel. Fertile, populous, diverse, and Islamic, the Fergana Valley is split between three countries, with borders determined by Soviet-era administrative lines. The Syr Darya runs through the upper left corner of the frame. Khujand, TajikistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
18 of 27An Uzbek woman poses in the courtyard of her home in the outfit her husband told her to wear in public. Banned in Soviet times, the paranja is the traditional robe worn by women in the Fergana Valley. Karasu, KyrgyzstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
19 of 27Chopping mutton, eating an apple in a samsa restaurant at the Sunday bazaar. On the right is a clay oven. Samarkand, UzbekistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
20 of 27Plates of food be served at a birthday party. Syr Darya, UzbekistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
21 of 27A shaman cures a woman of fatigue. Dushanbe, TajikistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
22 of 27Mens hour in the main pool at Garam Chashma, a mineral spring in the Tajik Pamir mountains. People soak in the spring to cure skin ailments and other illnesses. Garam Chashma, TajikistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
23 of 27Late at night, a shaman called Burul performs Zhar Solu to purify the home and soul of her friend. They light candles to call the spirits. Talas, KyrgyzstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
24 of 27A shelf of books and a framed picture displayed in a Pamiri home, high and isolated in the Tajik Pamir mountains. Bartan, TajikistanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
25 of 27The shaman Burul lays out playing cards on her kitchen table to study her client's life. Talas, KyrgyzstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
26 of 27A shaman named Bubusade treats a young woman from her village with a massage. a village near Talas, KyrgyzstanCarolyn Drake—Panos -
27 of 27In spring, a horse grazes in a clearing where the snow has melted. These Tian Shan mountains mountains make up 80% of the country. Suusamyr Valley, KyrgyzstanCarolyn Drake—Panos
The land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the rivers the ancient Greeks knew as the Oxus and Jaxartes, serves for many of us as the ultimate flyover territory as we jet from Europe to Asia and beyond. Carolyn Drake, an American photographer who has worked for TIME, the New Yorker and National Geographic, spent five years and 15 trips roaming this expanse of Central Asia, documenting a hardy people who survived on the fringes of empires Russian and Chinese. From her travels to places with Tolkien-esque names—Osh, Termez, Kokand—comes a photography book called Two Rivers. It is a surreal and improbably luminous work, leavened by the kind of humor that flourishes in the harshest of places.
The land between the two rivers once supported fishing ports and fertile farms. But the ecological aggression of the Soviets, not to mention the toll of global warming, has robbed the region of liquid and life. Boats are now marooned on earth, livestock parched. Always there is dust. Raised in coastal cities and most comfortable when the horizon ends in a confluence of sea and sky, I find the aridness unsettling. Yet Carolyn captures the counterpoints to the landlocked breadth: a dirty puddle, a rush of irrigation water, a murky pool embellished with Olympic iconography.
If the Inuits, perhaps apocryphally, have dozens of words for snow, surely the peoples of Central Asia living in present-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan must know how to distinguish between so many shades of brown: the salt flats of what once was the Aral Sea; the rusting machinery of the Soviet planned economy; the matted wool of a dirty sheep; all those deserts with all that sand; the stalks of cotton plants that suck up scarce water; the nuts and flatbread Central Asians offer up with their boisterous hospitality.
Yet even in this sere landscape, Carolyn displays an appetite for color that’s bold, maybe even defiant. There is the exuberant overlay of patterns that Central Asian women assemble as they dress each morning. We are treated to turquoise doorframes, the plumage of a freshly killed duck on white tiling and the burnt umber of an aged Moskvitch car from which a sad-eyed man stares out. Gaudy packages are used to smuggle heroin. Near the source of the two rivers, Carolyn gives us the frozen white of the Tianshan Mountains—I wonder what word the Inuits have for this particular manner of snow? And there is, of course, the visual assault of the monuments to ego built by post-Soviet dictators, whose love of gilt, marble and ever-flowing fountains underlines the paucity of the surrounding land.
One afternoon in mid-2011, when Carolyn and I were working together on a story in far western Kazakhstan, we wandered behind an oil refinery on the outskirts of Atyrau. A network of run-off canals extended into the desert, the water startlingly limpid despite the unseen chemicals. Ethnic Russians,with limp, sandy hair and sunbaked torsos, lounged among the cattails, drinking vodka and fishing for the kind of small, hardy creatures that seem to thrive amid pollution. The placid scene I replay in my mind recalls the best qualities of Carolyn’s photographs: strange, even toxic oases in which people find pleasure because what else is there to do but celebrate what little the land has given them?
Carolyn Drake began photographing Two Rivers in 2007, traveling frequently from her base in Istanbul. The work was funded in part by a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a finalist for the Santa Fe Prize. With text by Elif Batuman, the book was self-published in June 2013.
Hannah Beech is TIME’s China bureau chief and East Asia correspondent.
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