My Air India flight heads into Kabul, past the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush. I worship these mountains. Indeed, I’m in awe of Afghanistan’s rugged landscape; it overwhelms me each time I return, and I always feel as if I am seeing it for the first time. The mountains offer a serenity unknown in the populated areas below, where terrorism, violence, and oppression are the norm.
I have been coming to this country since the United States began bombing it in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on US sites. I went there initially on assignment for Getty Images’ news service and then later from my own desire to catalogue the daily lives of the Afghan people – from the chattering women in the beauty parlours to the boys who kick soccer balls around the dusty fields or fly kites in the hills above Kabul. I want to tell these stories in a way that will make the outside world take a second look and see beyond the suicide bombs. I want to show that the Afghans and this war-ravaged country have suffered enough, though their tribulations continue unabated.
Outside the newly renovated Kabul airport, I board a dilapidated bus crowded mostly with Afghans. I see no other Westerners. The international presence seems to have shrunk each time I return. It is spring, and the blooming flowers and trees take me back to New England, where I grew up, a welcome distraction from thoughts about possible Taliban attacks (the road from the airport has always been a target). But my mind wanders only momentarily, and then I am back here in Afghanistan. I check Twitter on my iPhone for any threat alerts – the world now being very different from the one in place when I first arrived; in 2001, we had to use satellite phones.
The technical side may have improved, but working in Afghanistan as a female photojournalist has its unique difficulties, including cultural and religious taboos. For example, prayer is so important to Muslim culture that it seemed vital for me to document people worshiping in this way. In moderate countries it may be easier for me to enter a mosque, but in Afghan culture, at least during my first years there, I could enter only on the women’s side, and I had to stand in the back without photographing anyone. I did overcome that obstacle when my male translator finally managed to get me permission to photograph women during their Friday prayer at Kabul’s Madinatul-Elm mosque. (In some parts of the country where the Taliban rule, women are rarely seen on the streets and pray only inside the home.)
Of course, being a woman does offer some advantages; unlike men, I can go into the closed-off women’s quarters of homes. But ultimately Afghan men hold the power and call the shots, often deciding what women may do, as well as where and when they may do it. On a trip for a project on war widows, for example, I often had only one chance to visit and photograph in a home because one of the male relatives refused to allow me to return.
I keep going back hoping to find fewer doors slamming shut and more people finding reasons to smile.
Even when I felt things were going smoothly, the door might be abruptly slammed in my face. Some people suggested that I could increase my security by wearing a burqa, because then the neighbours wouldn’t notice me. But who can say? One young widow I met with the help of a female fixer seemed to be an ideal subject to photograph as we talked over tea. But I wasn’t allowed back, and even though I had taken no photographs while I was in her home, I heard she was beaten after we left. In the only picture I have of her, she is standing, completely veiled, at her husband’s graveside. For Afghan women, violence goes far beyond the casualties and trauma of war.
The deteriorating security situation also creates barriers. Roads that I travelled years ago are hardly safe now. On many occasions, going as far back as 2003, I easily drove to Bamiyan, which remains one of the most beautiful and peaceful parts of the country despite the jarring destruction of the massive Buddhist statues that were carved into a mountainside there some 1,400 years ago. In 2009, I photographed a beautiful eight-year-old Hazara girl wearing a pink headscarf and standing in the doorway of a cave where her impoverished family lived. I wonder whether she is married now – most likely she is, for Afghan girls marry in their early teens, and many of them are forced into it. For me she represents both the beauty and the harsh reality of this war-torn country.
Today I can take a commercial flight to Bamiyan, but I certainly can’t drive there anymore because of the potential threats from bandits or the Taliban. These threats merely keep me from making pictures, but for Afghans, they can mean not making it to a health clinic or hospital until it’s too late or actually not making it there at all.
In this country sadness is a way of life – though sometimes, so too is happiness. I have made some of the most extraordinary photos of my career in Afghanistan, with face after face offering a complex and intriguing gaze and revealing the constant tension between optimism and reality that shapes the lives of so many here. I keep going back, motivated and inspired by those faces, pushing against the difficulties, hoping to find fewer doors slamming shut and more people finding reasons to smile. Many stories, both warm hearted and harrowing, remain to be told. And they need to be told. Grateful for the access I have been given, I haven’t let go of the many photos I wish I could have taken if only I had been granted access.
Every time I return to Afghanistan, I go back knowing I will make photos that show me an existence I could not otherwise have imagined. I took one such photo in 2014, the third time I covered a presidential election there. Several women were waiting to vote in the gender-segregated polling centre; ‘faceless’ behind their veils, they cowered when I raised my camera, hiding behind their burqa-covered arms as if I would otherwise expose them.
These women can’t be seen, but they are still afraid they will be disclosed. And that, for me, is Afghanistan: an odd closeness between hope and fear. The tiny distance between those two poles emerges everywhere. When I photographed Nowruz, the Afghan New Year – a day Afghanis spend with family, enjoying life – two young boys dressed in their best clothes proudly posed with their toy guns for me. If conflict is all you ever experience, can happiness ever be defined without it?
Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear by Paula Bronstein is available to buy for £41.22 from amazon.co.uk
