Chinese Turkestan by Ryan Pyle

Ryan Pyle is a Toronto-born photographer, documentary filmmaker, and television presenter based in Asia. A regular contributor to the New York Times from 2004, he was named by PDN Magazine as one of the 30 emerging photographers in the world in 2009, and has since produced and presented major documentary series for the BBC, Discovery Channel, and Travel Channel, winning multiple Asian Academy Awards for cinematography, direction, and non-fiction series. A member of the Explorers Club and a Guinness World Record holder, Pyle has been filming in China since 2001.

Chinese Turkestan is a photographic portrait of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, a vast territory of over 1.6 million square kilometres of desert, river basins, mountains, and grasslands in north-west China, at the ancient crossroads of Europe and Asia. Traversed for centuries by the trade routes of the Silk Road and home to a remarkable diversity of peoples and cultures, Xinjiang is a region of extraordinary beauty and profound complexity. Pyle first visited in 2001 and returned repeatedly over the following years, documenting cities including Kashgar, Urumqi, Turpan, Hotan, and Kuche, as well as the remote and extraordinary landscapes in between.

de.MO designed the book, travel photography book design for a document of one of the most isolated and visually compelling regions on earth.