Living Shrines of Uyghur China: Photographs by Lisa Ross

Three essays—by a historian of Central Asian Islam, a Uyghur folklorist, and the curator of an accompanying exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art— contextualise the photography of sacred Uyghur shrines. This volume emerges at a critical time, as modernization and new policies for development of China’s far west bring about rapid, extreme, and irrevocable change; the region is its largest source of untapped natural gas, oil, and minerals. Many of the sites in Ross’s work are threatened by political and economic pressures—her images are valuable, therefore, not only for their intrinsic beauty, but as an important record of a rich and vibrant culture increasingly under threat.