Portraits from afar

He instead showed photos of Tibetan herdsmen laboring in heavy snow and of pilgrims performing chak tsal (Tibetan ritual prostration).

Yamashita focuses his lens on people who survive extreme environments and practice traditional lifestyles.

"This is why I'm drawn back to China again and again," he says. "The fashion may have changed. The cities certainly have. But certain practices are exactly the same as they've been for centuries."

The photographer has done 20 stories in China since his first visit in 1982. He adores recording such spectacles as Pu'er tea growers in Yunnan steaming and pressing leaves into flat slabs largely in the same way they have for centuries. He's fascinated by how they still use 29-kilogram green stones to manually press the leaves.

But Yamashita has noticed changes brought even to isolated areas by more than three decades of opening-up and reform. Many of his works hint at such changes, such as a portrait of a Tibetan woman hand-making yak butter in front of a color TV set. A night shot of the Potala Palace shows the ancient holy place above Lhasa's modern buildings, electric lights and traffic.

"So many of the photos I've taken in the past 30 years can not be taken anymore because things change so fast," Yamashita says. "I see my role, my legacy here in China, as preserving the past for Chinese because some situations in my photos can no longer be seen."