A building-size portrait of Tajik president Emomali Rahmon is dwarfed by a Soviet-era statue of Lenin in the eastern outpost of Murghab, in Tajikistan.

Believers in an orthodox church in Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Chinese migrant laborers building a road in northern Tajikistan

Trying on hats in Margilan, Uzbekistan

Roadside melon stall near Samarkand, Uzbekistan

Kyrgyz wrestlers at a village celebration in Ak Bulak, eastern Kyrgyzstan

Wedding couple in Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Cattle wander by the abandoned hulls of fishing boats on the dried bed of the Aral sea in Moynaq, Uzbekistan - formerly one of the four largest lakes in the world.

Rangkul, Murghab, Eastern Pamirs, Tajikistan

A magician in a makeshift circus in Dushanbe, Tajikistan

Rationing out rice in Badakhshan, Afghanistan

Cotton harvest near Tursunzoda, Tajikistan

Sary Tash, one of the border crossings between Kyrgyzstan and China

A rusting Lenin on the outskirts of Khujand, northern Tajikistan