Drake's extensive work among people in Central Asia, and Xinjiang in China, is presented in two self-published books, Two Rivers and Wild Pigeon.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented a solo exhibition of the latter and acquired the collection of original works from the project in 2018.
[9] The region, encompassing Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, was transformed when the rivers were diverted for cotton irrigation by the former Soviet Union.
[12] For Jeffrey Ladd, the book's design (by Sybren Kuiper), notably the way some photographs on recto pages have their right edges on the verso, detracted from it.
[19] For Jeffrey Ladd, the design of the book (again by Sybren Kuiper) avoided the excesses of that of Two Rivers, and "The results of the collages [by the people Drake photographed] are unexpectedly rich and create the sense of a place that is both [ordinary] with daily routine and imbued with the fantastic that is accented by Drake's own perceptions: young teenagers dance under a burst of colored light; a classroom that seems to take on surreal drama; a dog fight; skeletal remains hanging in a butcher shop.