Lahore, Pakistan, is more visibly armed than Alabama, choked by Kafka-grade bureaucracy and pollution so thick you spit gray into the sink when you brush your teeth.
These realities do not mar Lahore’s five spreads in THE SILK ROAD: A Living History (Hemeria, $55), a sometimes beautiful travelogue of landscapes, buildings and faces along the route that once conveyed untold wealth between Europe and China, before the 16th century took trade out to sea.
What the photographer Christopher Wilton-Steer does catch is the odd potential for solitude in a city so populous, as well as its architectural dignity and the benevolent pride with which Pakistanis regard outsiders. Wilton-Steer is a Londoner. In his overland trek spanning thousands of miles and 170 photographs, taken from both drone and ground vantages, his goal is feel-good: to prove that the Silk Road’s “legacy of interconnectivity and exchange” lives today, he writes, even if the literal goods now go by boat.
The photos deliver. Because they flow west to east in the book, and because Wilton-Steer’s favorite angles emerge as patterns throughout, they braid a telling human gradient: from onion domes in Venice to the pitched facades of Uzbekistan, from a Christian stele in Turkey to a Buddhist one in South Asia, from Uyghur faces to Han ones across China. And much to his credit, he doesn’t falsely rusticate. His natives drive trucks past ruined Soviet airstrips. They wear cheugy leopard-print sweaters when they spin wool. That’s life.
But revelation isn’t the endgame of the picturesque. Wilton-Steer’s crinkled peaks and tender children of Tajikistan are prettily shot, but does it matter that the new schools, infrastructures, marketplaces and tourist centers that he depicts have been funded by the Aga Khan IV, the late billionaire developer and Muslim leader whose foundation also financed the photographer’s voyage? (Wilton-Steer is the organization’s head of communications.) This welcome if partisan book optimistically suggests that although container ships do the carrying now, cultural traders are alive and well on the Silk Road.
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