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Hidden Statement – Art in Afghanistan
Harder to define still is what makes a truly dynamic photographer - someone who is capable of navigating the urban terrain with camera ... more >> The photographer's tools are few and modest - frame, crop, focus, shoot. Yet, when the right opportunity presents itself (one that Henri Cartier-Bresson famously coined the 'decisive moment'), these tools may be applied to the world of bricks, stone, sand, and earth to slice, remove, freeze, and narrate.
Harder to define still is what makes a truly dynamic photographer - someone who is capable of navigating the urban terrain with camera in hand to transform the physical into the visual, and thus tell a unique story of the city through an image.
The punchy, street-style snapshots of Jafar Images, a photographer from Afghanistan, reveal a clear impulse to distill the richness and movement of Afghan culture from the ground - to reveal whatever may be found on and beneath the street. In a separate series, presented in the adjacent exhibition room, photographs depicting women at work in one of the few remaining professions open to them since Taliban rule in 2021 - teaching - are indicative of the restrictions placed upon Afghan women.
Jafar Image presents the viewer with a cross-section of life as it is today in a country ravaged by violence and oppression. And yet, one in which life defianttly permeates.
- The quotes presented in this exhibition are from a series of interviews conducted in 2023 with female teachers and young Afghan girls, titled: Afghanistan girls' education: 'When I see the boys going to school, it hurts'. The interviews were conducted by BBC journalist Yogita Limaye and may be read in full context here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65058099
