Drake’s photographs reveal the textures of a nation too often reduced to myths, stereotypes, and clichés.

The photographer Carolyn Drake set out for the U.S.-Mexico border just after Donald Trump won the Presidency. On the stump, he’d talked obsessively about building a wall—“big, fat, beautiful”—and Drake was struck, but not surprised, by its popular reception. “A lot of people in the U.S. were imagining that idea for a long time,” she told me recently. “There are people in this country who want to protect themselves from what they perceive as the dangers of Mexico and Mexicans, and I wanted to see the place that felt like it needed protection.” For two weeks, she drove from California to El Paso, taking pictures of the people, scenes, and landscapes she saw along the way. She made another trip just after the Inauguration, this time starting in El Paso and driving east, across Texas. “I felt I could see America better from a little north of the border,” she said.

Outside the faint burnt-yellow, brick-and-mortar walls of Internat Children’s Home you can find two disparate worlds: the verdant forest and the bustling suburb in Ternopil, Ukraine. But inside the Soviet-era building, there exists a third: populated by a few young women forced to create a world in isolation. Photographer Carolyn Drake has spent nearly a decade committing their world to the record.

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. The book was self-published in June 2013.

Carolyn Drake ‘s project, Uyghur, documents Xinjiang, China in a variety of ways–by photographing objects as a way of visually journaling her thoughts and feelings, collaborating with the people she encountered in the province and asking them to reinterpret her photographs through drawing and text, and by showing us what was and what is.  This three tiered way of capturing place gives us a rich tapestry of a province in transition.