China Portraits Revisited

A Naxi man in the village of Wenhai. He was attending a wake at the house adjacent to the guesthouse where we sometimes spent weekends after walking up into the mountains from Lijiang. 

(Click images to view larger--best viewed on something larger than a phone!)

I bought my first digital camera in 2005, a six-megapixel Nikon D70, just before Ellen, Bei, and I moved to China for a year to teach English. I also took my last film camera to China, but once I started shooting with the D70, I never used it again. With digital, I could shoot as much as I wanted without worrying about the cost or hassle of processing, and there was a lot to photograph.  

We lived in Lijiang, a UNESCO World Heritage site in the Yunnan Province, near the Tibetan border on the edge of the Himalaya. On weekends, we hiked to villages in the mountains or traveled to towns near Lijiang, and on longer holidays, we wandered farther, mostly to frontier areas where various Chinese ethnic groups lived. In the summer of 2006, after we finished teaching, we traveled more widely, making our way across Western China and eventually to Kashgar, where Uyghur culture was still relatively unscathed by the Chinese government’s campaign to squash it. 

 

At that time, I wished that I’d visited China earlier. The country seemed to be booming. Highrise apartment buildings and highways were under construction everywhere, gnawing away at what remained of the old China, but now, twenty years later, I realize how lucky we were to visit villages in the mountains where the traditional way of life was still largely intact and to see firsthand the mixture of untouched old towns and Chinese-style modernization.

 

The Chinese people wherever we went were universally friendly to us, especially when they learned that we were teachers and when they met Bei, our adopted daughter, who was four the year we moved. I’m usually shy about taking close-up photographs of people, but their openness emboldened me enough to ask permission to photograph, and people were usually welcoming—sometimes even hamming it up a little for the camera. 

 

I’ve recently been revisiting my China photographs, reprocessing the old digital files to remove color-casts and improve contrast before archiving them in a self-published Blurb Book, though the files from that now twenty-year-old camera are surprisingly good. While doing this, I’ve realized that I have a lot of portraits, so I’m publishing a collection of them here. I kept a blog when we lived in China (Ken, Ellen, and Bei in China), and I’ve published a few of these portraits in this blog (link, link, link), but I’ve never put them all in one place. 

 

I wish I could visit some of these people again and give them prints—especially the children who now must now be in their 20s or 30s. It would be fun to know what their lives have been like since we so briefly met twenty years ago.

We met this woman on market day in a town called Liming. She was puffing away on her pipe, smoking cannabis that grows wild in that part of China and enjoying the festivities. Liming has since become a destination for rock climbers thanks to the impressive cliffs above town. 

A young girl I met in the vast Sangke grassland near the Labrang Buddhist monastery at Xiahe in the Gansu Province. I was out by myself for a walk along a two-track road in the grassland, and she came out of a small house and walked down to greet me over the fence that surrounded her yard. 

During one vacation, we hiked for several days in the mountains, ending up at a lake called Lugu Hu (Hu means Lake). We met these two along the trail on the first day of our hike.

A woman from the Bai ethnic group at market in Xizhou near the town of Dali in the Yunnan Province. Bai people settled here about 3000 years ago and number about 1.5 million according to the Lonely Planet guide that we had at that time.

A Naxi boy at Wenhai Lake. The head scarf is called a Datou.

A Uyghur man in Kashgar in far western China. At this time (2006), Uyghur culture was much more intact than it is today.

A woman at the market in Wupaer, outside of Kashgar. I have another photo of her with her daughter and grandchild.

Kids horsing around in the old town of Kashgar which has since been destroyed by the Chinese. These were happier times for the Uyghurs. 

A Naxi woman at Wenhai Lake near Lijiang.

A young woman at Turfan, a desert town on the edge of the vast Taklamakan Desert in Western China south of Urumqui. 

The temple-keeper at Shibaoshan, a complex of temples in the Yunnan Province. Shibaoshan means "Stone Treasure Mountain."

A young woman in Kashgar. She and a large group of kids were running around in the narrow alleys of Old Kashgar when I met them. 

Another young woman in Kashgar.

Two friends in Kashgar.

A child from the Yi ethnic group in the mountains above Lijiang. There are about 9 million Yi people in China living mostly in rural areas in the southwestern part of the country. 

While not exactly a portrait, this captures a moment of connection in Kunming early one morning when I was walking in town. The salespeople in their red jackets were lined up to receive what I presume was a pep talk at a phone store when this woman turned to look at me.

Three kids at Dabao Si, a Tibetan temple area north of Lijiang on the road to Zhongdian. 

Naxi musicians in Baisha near Lijiang.

I'll finish with this--one of my favorites. Our daughter Bei is with two Naxi men in Yulong, near Lijiang. Their warmth and kindness is typical of people we met that year. 

Summer Driving, Photography, and Goldfield, Nevada

An abandoned train car in Goldfield, Nevada. (Click on photos to view larger)

When I saw a chance for a road trip in late August, I took it. It had been a long summer. The monsoon mostly fizzled in Silver City, limiting us to early morning hikes on local trails and afternoon crossword puzzles under our ceiling fan. I’d barely lifted my camera for months, unmotivated to search for photos under a blaring sun and too lazy to climb out of bed before dawn to catch fleeting morning light. 

 

So I agreed eagerly to deliver a used car to our daughter in Ferndale, Washington (near Bellingham), spend a few days visiting, and then fly home. My plan was to make the 2,000-mile trip in 2.5 days, leaving a little time to take a few photographs if opportunities arose. 

I left Silver City on a hot morning, pausing to photograph familiar scenes along I-10 in New Mexico--a Lordsburg school bus, permanently parked in a gravel lot; a tire shop in Road Forks where gas is cheap--before pushing on to Tucson to spend two nights between doctor’s appointments in a surprisingly luxurious $100 hotel.

An old school bus in Lordsburg, NM.

A quonset hut in Lordsburg, NM.

Tires, Road Forks, NM.

Leaving Tucson in the late afternoon after my last appointment, I soon found myself in Phoenix traffic, inching along with hundreds of commuters, the car thermometer pegged at 115 degrees outside my air-conditioned sanctuary. I’d stopped once to photograph a canal delivering water to the city, even as Lakes Powell and Meade shrank to near critical levels and triggered water reductions for the Lower Basin States, but then the heat and traffic squelched my photographic ambition. My admiration for photographers successful in extreme weather grew. Later, between Phoenix and Kingman, I stopped briefly and photographed cacti in the blazing sun at a rest area and a lonely and strangely tilted thunderhead hanging over dry hills west of the highway, producing only virga. 

Canal southeast of Phoenix.

A tilted thunderhead between Phoenix and Kingman, AZ.

I could relate to Sally Mann, a well-known and sometimes controversial photographer, who once embarked on a long road trip through the Southeast, eager to take haunting images of old plantations and southern rivers, but days in she had nothing, lamenting:

D was keen on finding a graveyard where a Confederate relative had been buried and my heart lifted at the prospect of romantically drooping moss-draped branches and ancient, lichen-covered tombstones. Who can’t get a good picture in a cemetery? Apparently me. Hardly worth bringing out the camera. I was discouraged, the 2^nd long day of this trip and so far, three gas stations, a weed-covered hill, and Stalinist blocks of stone instead of tombstones. No moss. Blazing sun, no atmospheric haze. Regular old trees. (Sally Mann from Art Work: On the Creative Life, pg. 171)

I spent that night in Kingman, Arizona in a Ramada Inn decorated with Rt. 66 nostalgia during this 100^th anniversary of the iconic highway. The next morning, I woke early and headed for Las Vegas, driving through a strangely hazy landscape of sparse desert vegetation and low hills bathed in what could only be described as drab light, like a classic black and white photograph but without enough contrast. I stopped anyway, forcing myself to snap photos of dirt roads leading away from the highway toward distant hills, hoping to jump-start my creative instincts despite the light, wondering what a good photographer might see that I didn’t. 

 

Ramada Inn, Rt. 66, Kingston, AZ.

Gate and road in drab light between Kingman, AZ and Las Vegas, NV.

Finally, I hit a little paydirt in an old Nevada mining town called Goldfield, about thirty miles south of Tonopah. I’d stopped to photograph a mildly-inspiring, abandoned gas station by the highway when a white-bearded local driving an ATV stopped to talk to me. He pointed me down 5^th Street to the old ghost town and railroad yard of Goldfield, suggesting that the best photo-opps were there and needlessly apologizing that Goldfield didn’t have more to offer. I headed down 5^th to an area where I could have spent the rest of the day had I not had so many miles to cover. I was in a good place in the harsh light of midday, but I tried to make the best of it, photographing old miner’s cabins, railroad cars, piles of junk, and the remarkably untouched remnants of a town that bustled with activity 120 years ago.

 

A strangely undisturbed miner's cabin in Goldfield.

Another miner's cabin where they finished their drinks and left town without even recycling.

Goldfield boomed after particularly rich gold deposits were found there in 1902, soon after Tonopah became a silver boomtown, drawing prospectors to the area. At its peak, 20,000 people lived in Goldfield, making it the largest town in Nevada at that time. Some of the gold was so pure that miners hid nuggets in their boot heels and hollowed-out axe handles according to legend. Wyatt Earp and his brother, Virgil, once roamed the streets. A bar in town was a block long, requiring 30 bartenders to keep the whiskey flowing. But, bust follows boom, and by 1910 the mines were more expensive to operate than they were worth, and the crowds moved on. A flash flood in 1913 destroyed some of the town, and an exploding moonshine still in 1923 set much of what was left on fire. Today, about 225 people live in Goldfield.

Old safe, Goldfield, NV.

Truck interior, Goldfield, NV.

More recently, the quirky “International Car Forest of the Last Church”, just outside of Goldfield, has become a draw for travelers. The Car Forest is an installation of old cars, buses, and trucks, embedded as if they’d flown in from outer space, nose-diving into the dirt. Graffiti artists decorate and redecorate. Hipsters make videos. The rest of us walk around in the hot sun, peering into makeshift car-rooms and watching out for snakes.

 

The International Car Forest of the Last Church.

While researching Goldfield, I was surprised to find a video of Alex Honnold exploring the town and its adjacent car art installation, apparently as part of a Nevada promotional campaign. If you haven’t heard of him, Honnold is famous for palm-sweating unroped climbs of massive cliffs, culminating in his free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite, a climb captured in the Oscar-winning documentary, Free Solo. He looked more comfortable in that film climbing the Monster Corner thousands of feet off the deck, unroped, than he did sitting in a makeshift radio studio in Goldfield being interviewed by Carl, the local DJ, and listening to the “Burro Weather Forecast.” He did manage to climb the vertical bus in the Car Forest, a probable first ascent that I now wish I’d ticked before Honnold when I was there in 2024 so that I could call him out on his claim. That would have been a moment of glory.

 

Alex Honnold claims the first ascent of the upended school bus.

Just as Goldfield quickly turned from boom to bust, so did my photography. I pulled into Winnemucca after dark that night, booking a room in the Shady Grove Motel. A few of the rooms were occupied by long-term renters—a quiet group of men gathered around a grill in the shade, cooking dinner. Across the parking lot from them, each room was labeled with the name of a saint (or perhaps towns named for saints). Christian martyrs (Ynez, Susana) guarded some rooms while others commemorated domestic activities (Rosa, the patron saint of embroidery and gardening). I pity the newly married couple booking the Santa Rita room, named for the patron saint of “impossible, broken, or deeply troubled marriages.” My room was off to the side, surprisingly large and unconsecrated. After a good meal at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks away, I hit the sack, anticipating an early start and a fourteen-hour drive to Bellingham. 

The Shady Grove Motel, Winnemucca, NV.

The last day of my trip was a grueling push with little time to stop except to get gasoline and fast food. I was lured briefly from the car between Winnemucca and Boise by a collection of animal skulls. Later, I drove into the dense smoke of Northwestern wildfires, over the Cascades, and into the rush of Seattle traffic before arriving in Ferndale in time for dinner.

Part of a large collection of skulls north of Winnemucca.

I'll finish with a few more Goldfield, Nevada photos, a place where someday I'll spend a few days.

Rocking chair in train car, Goldfield, NV.

Window curtain in an old cabin, Goldfield, NV.

Metal door, Goldfield, NV.

E-bike prototype? Goldfield, NV.

 

 

The New Mexico Bootheel

Sunrise at Granite Gap, just north of the Bootheel, with the Pyramid Mountains in the background.

(Click images to view larger)

I scoured Mountain Project (an online crowd-sourced rock-climbing guide) before moving to Southern New Mexico in 2023, hoping to find climbing areas near Silver City. There are a few, but Granite Gap near the “Bootheel,” the southward protrusion of New Mexico that borders Arizona and Chihuahua, Mexico, sounded especially intriguing because of its obscurity, even though the climbing wasn’t very tempting. The Mountain Project reporter noted that: 

“Much of the rock is dubious…This is a primitive desert environment where it seems every plant and animal is hostile. Cactus everywhere and huge rattlesnakes. Sounds great heh?”

Though bouldering with fat rattlesnakes and cactus spine landings didn’t appeal, empty desert along the Mexican border did, and I looked forward to exploring and photographing this unknown (to me) piece of New Mexico. Web searches revealed few images except for those by Continental Divide Trail hikers on the first few days of their northbound treks, taken as they slogged across shadeless desert, drinking from cattle troughs to get to Lordsburg and then the Gila National Forest, where the trail becomes less stark. A few people have documented tiny towns and mining ruins, but images are scarce, prompting dreams of unique photo opportunities, rare in a world so awash in imagery.

A cholla flower at Granite Gap, where the coarse soil supports a lusher vegetation than in much of the Bootheel.

Sotol flowers at Granite Gap.

Technically, Granite Gap is a little north of the Bootheel, though everything south of Lordsburg is usually lumped in. The Bootheel itself isn’t small, covering about 1,500 square miles, but that’s a tiny fraction of the area of New Mexico, and with a population density of about one person per square mile, most living around a few tiny towns (Animas, Cotton City, Hatchita, Rodeo) between mountain ranges, there’s a lot of empty country. But much of the land is private or inaccessible. 

An old saloon and its mural in the small town of Hatchita. Hatchita and the ruins of old Hatchita were mining towns. Now CDT hikers stop at the Hatchita store to refresh on their way north or south.

The Cotton City Grocery and Laundromat. 

The Diamond A Ranch, one of largest ranches in the Bootheel, is committed to conservation and cooperates with the Nature Conservancy but doesn’t allow public access, even forcing the CDT to be rerouted around their holdings and causing controversy due to locked gates on county roads which are supposed to be open to all. Some of the prominent mountain ranges (Big Hatchets, Alamo Huecos, Peloncillos) in the Bootheel include large Wilderness Study Areas but are difficult or impossible to access, while others (Animas, San Luis) are mostly private and off-limits. That’s a lot of intriguing country that is out-of-bounds for most of us.

Beth and Steve Buskirk and Ellen hiking in the Southern Peloncillo Mountains. Access to parts of the Peloncillos is blocked by the Diamond A and other private land holdings.

Despite the harsh arid environment, the Bootheel was home to indigenous people for thousands of years. I’ve read journal articles describing archaeological sites all over the area, many along the margins of playas that were presumably a source of water or in the foothills where water was also more abundant. On one trip, armed with waypoints gleaned from archaeological site descriptions, I tried to visit some of these pre-contact sites but was stopped every time by locked gates or No Trespassing signs. 

A cattle guard at the entrance to a road leading out onto a playa (dry lakebed) in the Bootheel.

More recently, Geronimo, the Apache military leader, surrendered in 1886 to Lt. Charles Gatewood near Skeleton Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains before being shipped to Florida to join other Apache prisoners. He died a prisoner of war in Ft. Sill, Kansas in 1909. A stone monument to his surrender west of the entrance to Skeleton Canyon incorporates matates once used to grind corn or mesquite pods, but that end of the canyon is blocked by private land, requiring long hot hikes to access it from the east or south. The title of David Roberts' book, Once They Moved Like the Wind, about Geronimo and the Apache wars, evokes the freedom Apache and other indigenous people enjoyed before ranchers and miners claimed the land for themselves.

A storm over the Chiricahua Mountains looking west into Arizona from near Skeleton Canyon.

Part of Mexico until the Gadsen Purchase in late-1853, the Bootheel and southern Arizona were the last significant addition of land to the contiguous United States. The $10 million purchase facilitated a southern transcontinental railroad between the South and the West Coast. This was before the Civil War, but southerners, including Gadsen, feared that without a southern railroad line, the North would benefit disproportionately from trade. Events leading to the purchase were complicated, but the result was the addition of close to 30,000 square miles of territory to the U.S. extending from near Las Cruces to the California border and incorporation Tucson, Yuma, and other important southwestern cities.

Sunset looking westward across country added to the U.S. by the Gadsen Purchase of 1853.

Today, the Bootheel is a hotspot for illegal immigration despite Trump’s wall and the heavy presence of the Border Patrol. In the Southern Peloncillos, I’ve seen border agents on horseback, rifles in scabbards, riding into the hills like a posse from the Old West to track immigrants. Border Patrol pickup trucks drag tires along road margins and fencelines, smoothing the dirt so that fresh footprints can be detected and followed. Camping near the border is said to be dangerous, and there are occasional incidents with smugglers moving people or drugs.

Water and juice perhaps left for immigrants in a chapel in Hatchita.

So, the Bootheel is an interesting and complicated place, but despite a half-dozen driving trips and a few exploratory hikes, I’ve seen little of it and photographed even less, mostly without much success. In the wide-open desert, it’s hard to find ways to anchor a 35 mm frame. The morning sun bursts over the horizon, transforming the Borderlands in minutes from soft to glaring light. Sunsets linger a little longer but are also fleeting, and the sky is often cloudless, less visually interesting than when storms sweep through, rarer during weak monsoons like I’ve experienced since moving to New Mexico. In summer, the Bootheel bakes in the sun and temperatures are often over 100 degrees, discouraging outdoor adventure. Still, the lure of obscurity is strong, and there is a lot of exploring to be done, particularly in the mountains. With work, these ranges can surely be accessed, even while we can no longer move through them like the wind.

A sofa in the living room of an abandoned house in Hatchita.

Seating (for funerals??) in the Cottonwood Cemetery along the Geronimo Trail in the Southern Peloncillo Mountains.

A sluggish Gila Monster at Granite Gap in November 2024.

A cowboy hat at a church in Hatchita.

The view southeast into the Bootheel from the ruins of Old Hatchita (now abandoned), a mining town.