John Gollings is Australia’s premier photographer of the built environment and cultural heritage. His photos reveal his skilled architectural eye to locate the beauty, drama and humanity in the humble home, ancient ruins, sacred shrines, and majestic palaces alike. His vast oeuvre includes photographs of the built environments of Libya, and the Gold Coast as well as the cities of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China. His commitment to documenting the built environments reaches far into history with collections on the Hindu temples of Borobodur in Indonesia and historic and sacred sites of Vijayanagara in India, as well as Khmer temples of Angkor Wat.

As part of the Kashgar Project of Monash University, Gollings has documented one of the most enduring Silk Road cities’ rapidly changing urban spaces where many relics of Uyghur culture and civilization are under threat. As people travel for trade and cultural exchange along the Silk Roads, dynamic urban centres developed—including the oasis city of Kashgar situated on China’s western-most border with neighbouring Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Kyrgystan. Its 2000-year history as a major trading hub makes Kashgar a unique urban environment of profound cultural significance. Gollings’ remarkable images, framed with architectural expertise, provide us with rare glimpses of the city as a living cultural and commercial space and as a site of ancient connection between people of different beliefs and customs.

In the same collection photographed in 2005, Gollings has documented many now-destroyed shrines, or mazar, that punctuate the Islamic paths forged across the Silk Road landscape. Ranging from large mosques to small shrines, mazar mark the burial places of saints, kings, or prominent intellectual and religious figures. They are significant locations of pilgrimage for Muslims seeking spiritual support during natural disasters or to achieve good health and fertility. The rituals performed in the mazar range from simple acts of quiet prayer through to feasting and dancing. Many of the mosques and shrines Gollings has photographed have been destroyed making their preservation in these striking images even more precious to the continued celebration of human life on the Silk Roads.

In the images below we invite you to consider the connection between the past and the present and to appreciate how communication and exchange between myriad different peoples over vast stretches of human history have produced urban spaces and sacred sites of ongoing significance.