PhotoBooks Afghanistan

From Kashmir to Kabul is the first book to piece together the remarkable careers of Baker and Burke. No photographers of the Raj era witnessed more wars, discoveries, news events and human diversity than did these two Irishmen. Few encountered the kinds of adverse conditions, hauling heavy equipment and glass plates over steep mountain ranges, and mixing chemicals at dangerously high altitudes than Baker and Bourke. Based on decades of research, this book chronicles their early days in Peshawar and their move to Muree, the Himalayan hill station on the border of Kashmir. It follows their documenting of the Afghan Wars, some of the earliest war photography, and their return to the plains of Lahore, where they continued to photograph the region’s people and landscape. Baker and Burke’s story is also the story of photography itself, a medium that was evolving at a dizzying pace—as quickly as the world they sought to capture was changing.

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Once upon a time, before the Soviet invasion and two decades of civil war, Afghanistan stood as a beautiful, if austere, country. Enchanted by the dramatic landscape, two photographers from the West devoted 14 years, from 1964 to 1978, to documenting its rugged charms. From ruined cities covered with desert sands to the Pamir mountains, where caravans of camels walk across frozen rivers in winter, to the Turkestan bazaars along the old Silk Road, Roland and Sabrina Michaud traveled and came to love this ravaged paradise and its proud peoples: Pashtuns, Tadjiks, Hazara farmers, Uzbek horsemen, Kirgiz shepherds, Nuristani mountain dwellers, and Derbiche vagrants.

With the Michauds' evocative photography and text by prizewinning poet and essayist André Velter, this striking testimony to the Afghanistan that once was will help readers understand and respect a country now so central to current events.

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Afghanistan has been ravaged by war for more than twenty years; the Soviet Union, the Mujaheddin, the Taliban and the United States have all played their part. Norfolk's powerfully beautiful images reveal utter devastation on a vast and overwhelming scale. Afghanistan is unique, utterly unlike any other war-ravaged landscape. In Bosnia, Dresden or the Somme, for example, the devastation appears to have taken place within one period, inflicted by a small gamut of weaponry. However, the sheer length of the war in Afghanistan, now in its 24th year, means the ruins have a bizarre layering; different moments of destruction lying like sedimentary strata on top of each other.

Afghanistan won the Leica-sponsored European Publishers Award for Photography 2002.

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An introduction to the geography, history, government, people, and economy of this landlocked country with a long history of warfare and conquest.

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A selection of images from "The Victor Weeps", published by Scalo in 1998. This smaller exhibition catalogue was produced collaboratively by the Volkart Foundation, Steidl Publishers, Light Work, and Fazal Sheik as a part of the International Human Rights Series. Both the book and the exhibition use narratives and pictures to unfold the conflicts that have ravaged the country and the people of Afghanistan over the past twenty years.

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Following the events of September, 11, 2001, the United States and its allies focused their attention and military efforts on the country of Aghanistan and, specifically, the Taliban regime that ruled it. This extraordinary book is packed with compelling photos and documents the fisrt three months of the war, from October to December, 2001. Through hundreds of photographs that capture a wide range of subjects and situations, readers will see for themselves how the ensuing political, military, economic and social conflicts have affected Afghanistan and its people.

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Afghanistan Diary is a provocative introduction to the recent history of the troubled country since the Mujahideen capture of Kabul in 1992. Documentary photographer Edward Grazda witnessed firsthand this hugely transformative period in modern Afghan history, from the destruction of the capital city five years into a ruinous civil war between Mujahideen factions, to their defeat by the Pakistani-supported Taliban militia, whose radical interpretation of Islamic law--and its draconian enforcement--is unarguably the most extreme in the Islamic world. Photographer Edward Grazda's sharp, penetrating lens distills the simple beauty of the place and its people alongside the horror of state-sanctioned human rights abuses. Over the course of nine years, Grazda secured unprecedented access to the country through friends and ex-officials, in both Afghanistan and in the U.S., to document the profound changes there caused by the great differences between the moderate Mujahideen and their arch enemies, the Taliban. Grazda's grasp of Afghan history and culture create an explosive expos of this outlaw nation.

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Arms Against Fury examines the dramatic struggle of the Afghan people through the lens of Magnum photographers, dating back to co-founder George Rodger's documentation of the country's role in World War II. Ever since, Magnum's intrepid photographers have crisscrossed the country's striking landscape from the Central Asian steppes to the parched southern desert by way of the Hindu Kush mountains surrounding Kabul and the adjacent Panjshir Valley. As early as the 1950s, Eve Arnold and Marc Riboud filed unprecendented stories from a legendary Shangri-la, showing a small kingdom struggling for statehood against the forces of underdevelopment and unfortunate geographic position during the Cold War. The ultimate overthrow of the monarchy and brutal liquidation of Afghanistan's consitutional government in 1978 heralded the arrival of Soviet-style communism. Peasants in Nuristan rebelled immediately and initiated a jihad that was covered first by Raymond Depardon and then by Stever McCurry, and later by renowned photojournalist Abbas, who also focused on the progress of the jihad, which eventually faced a massive Red Army invasion and savage aerial bombardments. The victory against the Soviets also signaled the beginning of a civil war that began in 1992. Documented by Luc Delahaye, Christopher Steele-Perkins, Abbas, and Stever McCurry, Afghan militias destroyed large swathes of Kabul. The Taliban militia subdued warring factions in 1996 and proclaimed an Islamic emirate. Steele-Perkins was one of the few journalists to report from Afghanistan during this period of theocratic tyranny. In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States, the hated Taliban were shaken from power by a loose alliance of mujahidin backed by American forces. Yet nothing seemed to remedy the miserable spectacle of a ruined country littered with ten million land mines and thousands of innocent victims of the hi-tech war on terror. The future of Afghanistan, as depicted by Abbas, Eve Arnold, Luc Delahaye, Thomas Dworzak, Alex Majoli, Steve McCurry, and Francesco Zizola, remains uncertain at best. Containing additional photographic work by Ian Berry, Elliott Erwitt, Stuart Franklin, Philip Jones Griffiths, Susan Meiselas, and Wayne Miller, commentary by the photographers, and several illustrated essays, Arms Against Fury will become an indispensable reference for documentary studies, social history, and critical photography.

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Zealotry has many forms of madness, and the Taliban are no exception. In the Toyota Land Cruiser abandoned in Kandahar by Mullah Omar, the man who banned music on pain of prison and torture, was found a cache of popular music CDs. Kandahar, a city of Pashtuns noted for their gaiety, so to speak, where Mullah Omar had made his final headquarters, has traditions of men in high-heeled sandals, with make-up of kohl and painted nails like sultry silent-movie stars. They liked to have their pictures taken and, because the Taliban most certainly needed passports, their vanities were accomodated in the hole-in-the-wall photo shops that exist in downtown Kandahar.

The Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak, on war assignment for the New Yorker, discovered their photographs days after they had fled the city. They hung among portraits of Bruce Lee, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ahmed Shah Massoud, their faces retouched by the artful brushwork of the photographer. As exotic backdrops the subjects have chosen chalets in the Swiss Alps, where the mountains are green and Julie Andrews sings, rather than the forbidding grey and brown of their own country. Some are alone, others with a friend or a Kalashnikov, with garish colours stroked into the theme, along with flowers. They were the killers who have fled, leaving behind an absurd record of their presence.

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