Contact photography festival probes identity from Turkestan to Manhattan

Open this photo in gallery: In My Silk Road to You, Kazakh artist Almagul Menlibayeva plays on an audience's exotic image of the region by posing women against monuments and landscapes of Central Asia.Courtesy the artist An Asian woman poses in front of a medieval monument in Turkestan wearing an improbably large headdress fashioned from dozens of red-and-silver skullcaps, their interlocking arrangement echoing the decorative tiles on the wall behind her. An African couple stands in a dark space with corn stalks around them, their faces masked by husks and their hands replaced by cobs. Those dramatically staged images -…