Special issue on Afghanistan
Renewal: Afghanistan
23 October 2015
Lorenzo Tugnoli, From the series The Little Book of Kabul

The hollow niche that encases the shattered remains of the Buddha in Bamiyan, an act enforced by the Taliban in 2001, was one of the images which seemingly captured the fate of Afghanistan – of religious intolerance and extremism. The issue attempts to unearth newer strains of practice that could unravel how visual culture may have changed through social media interventions and other practice driven initiatives, looking at more local imaging traditions and personal narratives with a generation that today faces a brutal past but is willing to freely engage in dialogue with the rest of the world. Hence through this issue, we seek to understand photography’s role in evolving visual histories that run parallel to news media, in a country where documentary and evidence photography have more likely been the predominant forms.
With support from
EDITORIAL
A ‘New’ Contemporary Art In Afghanistan
If ‘modernism’ is about how cultures adapt to and absorb from one another and how they develop a distinct language over time, the golden age of art in Afghanistan can be accorded to namely the 16th century. Herat, then the capital of Afghanistan was a prominent centre in the east – an...
Photography Renewed
There is a long, rich and interconnected history of visual arts in Afghanistan. The monumental statues of Buddha in Bamiyan constructed in the 2nd century A.D. during the reign of Kinishka, a powerful king of the Kushan Empire (60 – 375 A.D.) were a symbol of fortitude if not resilience and...
A Gulf In Practice
…the right way to photograph, to look at painting, to understand a country, to shun the picturesque, to ‘think’ a story, to ‘organize it in the mind;’ and of course to see – to learn to see... -Marc Riboud as quoted in the Photobook Review, May ’13. While Riboud travelled...
The Kabul Photography Workshop
Our taxi pulled up to an address at the busy intersection at Shahr-E-Nau as Kabul rushed by with late autumn colours. We were running late for a meeting at the newly minted offices of the Afghanistan Photography Network (APN); one of several such meetings with organisations concerned with...
