IF YOU’VE yet to shake your torch at the entrancingly musty smells and treasure troves of the recently reopened wonders at Pitt Rivers Museum, it’s about time you did.

Break away from the labyrinthine core of dimly lit and carefully curated curiosities to the bright white space of the Long Gallery and you’ll find Photographs of Central Asia, an exhibition by American award-winning, contemporary photographer Carolyn Drake.

Like the ancient anthropologists of yesteryear whose studies reside, preserved for the future, in climate-controlled cabinets, Carolyn Drake’s pictographic research resides in the form of digital documentary photography.

Her recent work was shot in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in Central Asia, and offers an enthralling insight into the often difficult day to day existence of ordinary people as they struggle with environmental change and the political and economic turmoil of post-Soviet times.

Despite its location at the heart of ancient trade routes connecting the Mediterranean with Asia, Tajikistan is the poorest of the post-soviet Central Asian Republics.

Landlocked between Russia, China, Afghanistan and Iran, most inhabitants in this region practised Islam, their communities organised around regional, clan-like political networks. However, in the 1920s, this land was absorbed into the USSR, religion was banned, political control was centralised, and people were assigned ethnic identities (Uzbek, Tajik, Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Kazakh).

Socially, economically, and geographically splintered, it is the fragmented and reassembled jigsaw of a region that Drake presents to us in this exhibition.

Handing over the subject matter to ordinary people, giving their everyday activities importance, Drake imbues her compositions with an airiness, capturing the magic of mundanity.

Hinting at early religious paintings, the compositions are made up of the dusty hues of desert sand and simple earthy tones punctuated only by flashes of bright, celebratory colour in the clothes and materials worn by the photographer’s subjects.

Walking down The Long Gallery with images of Tajikistan to the left, Uzbekistan to the right, it’s quite an awe-inspiring, humbling sight to see the effects that the all encompassing drought of a cotton-greedy world has had on communities across countries, and it becomes clear to see why, despite being one of the poorest post-soviet Central Asian Republics, Tajikistan is one of the most religious.

Despite the struggling lives and livelihoods, the pictures on the wall display an almost infectious commitment to belief, an inspirational celebration, dedication and determination, and a cacophony of colour that reaches beyond the picture plane into the gallery.

One young girl stands alone, illuminated like an angel in a field of wheat. The miracle – that wheat has been irrigated by snowmelt from nearby mountains.

Another image shows a lady praying silently in her simple domestic surroundings. In another photo you can almost hear the bubbling breaths as people gather in a crowded home to celebrate the annual Navrus festival – the coming of spring and rebirth.

A historically and visually rich exhibition, Photographs of Central Asia is a rare and bejewelled insight in which the story lies in the subtext.

A few moments spent admiring these works and it’s clear to see why Drake has received grants from the National Geographic, why her work is honored by UNICEF and the National Press Photographers Association, and why in 2006 and 2007 she was voted an emerging photographer to watch … so go and see what Drake’s been up to these past few years.

She’s emerged, and it’s enthralling!

Photographs of Central Asia is at the Pitt River Museum, South Parks Road, Oxford until November 15 • Entry: FREE • Open: 12pm-4.30pm Mondays; 10am - 16.30pm Tuesday to Sundays