Xinjiang

I took this series during my first year of college, right after the pandemic ended and travel felt possible again. It was a 20-day trip across Xinjiang, China's largest province, and also the first time I really used a camera to document my own life, even though most of what came out of it were, admittedly, just pictures of a trip.

Xinjiang holds an unreasonable amount of landscape for one province. In three weeks I went from desert dunes to snow-capped peaks, from wide farmland to canyon walls, from open basins to rock faces I ended up climbing partway up just to get closer to. These five images are what I kept from all of it, not because they were the most beautiful shots, but because something about each moment felt worth holding onto.

That instinct, that some moments are too good to just let pass, is the same one that later got me into photographing places like the American West. From images to videos, this love of documenting life continues, and I've since picked up a habit of recording and editing my own vlogs. Different mediums, same basic impulse: if I don't record it somehow, I lose the exact shape of how it felt. That habit also leads me into running my social media accounts.