Travel 2nd place winner

Borrowing from romanticized notions of the American frontier, synonymous with ideals of exploration, Out West intends to capture a visual narrative of China’s westernmost region, Xinjiang. Literally translating to “new frontier” in mandarin, Xinjiang is a land apart from China, which it once connected to Central Asia as the first leg of the Silk Road. For China’s ethnic Han majority, Xinjiang is once again the new frontier, to be awakened for Beijing’s new Silk Road - China’s own Manifest Destiny. But one nation’s expansion comes at great costs to others. The Uighurs, the local Muslim Turkic majority, who consider Xinjiang as their homeland and Chinese presence as colonial occupation, feel every day more alienated due to the mass migration of Chinese settlers and permanent confessional persecution by the secular Chinese state. Out West offers an experience of Xinjiang that highlights its estrangement from contemporary perceptions of the new China.

French photographer Patrick Wack was born in Cannes in 1979 and grew up close to Paris. After a career in sports and studies in economics that took him to the US, Sweden and Germany, he left a job in Berlin to pursue in China a passion for photography, and hopes of a less ordinary life. Fully self-taught, he worked from 2006 to 2017 as a Shanghai-based freelance photographer in the fields of editorial and commercial photography. Patrick also focuses on long-term personal projects mixing traditional documentary and subjective story telling to address issues such as national identity and modern mythologies. He has published in Time magazine, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The WSJ, The Monocle, Travel and Leisure, among others. In 2014 he was the recipient of the first Prize at the International Kuala Lumpur Portrait festival and his work has been exhibited in Shanghai, Beijing, Berlin, Singapore, Paris and Bordeaux. He is now based in Berlin and part of the German agency LAIF.