I removed my brown chador and my salwar kameez in the bathroom. My costume hadn’t shielded me from the Afghans’ heavy stares; few foreign women, women without burqas, traveled through the country. Only in the shower did I relax. The freedom, independence, and sexuality that I, as an American woman, held at the core of my being completely contradicted the Afghan way of life under the Taliban. I knew I had to shed my own views in order to work successfully here.
The UNHCR team passed me off to two men from the Comprehensive Disabled Afghans Program (CDAP), an organization that, among other things, rehabilitated Afghans injured by the thousands of land mines buried throughout the countryside by the Soviets. The mujahideen—Afghan factions who fought the Soviet occupiers—also took up the tactic, and as a result millions of mines continued to blow off the legs and hands of Afghans innocently walking or playing in the fields. As a journalist I was supposed to register with the Foreign Ministry in Kabul, but I decided to risk a few days in the countryside first. If the ministry knew of my presence in the country, they might forbid me from visiting certain areas or put a Taliban minder on my tail. My two CDAP escorts, my driver, Mohammed, and my guide and interpreter, Wahdat, weren’t members of the Taliban and thought we could travel undetected. Wahdat, who insisted I also call him Mohammed, would serve as my mahram in the absence of a male relative. In order to bring my cameras into the country, I said I was photographing the physical destruction left by war, but the two Mohammeds had planned an ambitious journey through the provinces of Logar, Wardak, and Ghazni, where they could introduce me to Afghan civilians: land mine victims, widows, doctors, families.
Afghanistan was a tribal culture. Women were cloistered inside large compounds that only other women or male relatives could enter, and I knew it would be impossible to get a candid interview with a woman the moment they saw Mohammed. My guide was in his early forties, with gray-streaked dark brown hair and the long black beard customary among Pashtun men. Their tribe is the largest in Afghanistan and widely considered the most conservative. The Taliban comprised primarily Pashtun men, though some Tajiks and Hazaras were also members. Mohammed’s wrinkled map of a face reflected a lifetime of war, repression, and poverty and obscured any trace of his youth. As my mahram, he had to accompany me, a woman alone, wherever I went. From the start of my journey, I struggled with how to skirt the Taliban photography ban: images burned my eyes and my soul, but I was too nervous about the consequences to dare sneak a picture as I looked out the car window and watched potential frames fade into the moving countryside. This was a country where a machine gun was more prevalent than a Nikon, and I knew that every picture I took would require an intricate process of negotiation—with both my mahram and my subject. Without speaking Persian or Dari, I had to rely on my guide to be my voice in a delicate situation. I was stripped of my ability to work myself into a scene, to gain access into people’s lives with the ritual of negotiation that photographers depend on. Over the last several years I had learned how to observe people by establishing that initial rapport through eye contact. In Afghanistan I could barely look at people. I had to constantly remind myself not to look men in the eye. There were so many rules and restrictions, especially against photographing women.
But because the Taliban had banned TV, foreign media, and newspapers—any publications aside from religious documents—most Afghans knew the images I shot would never make it back into their country. They did not have to worry about Afghans seeing their women in, say, the Houston Chronicle. Much to my surprise, many Afghans, male and female, were open to being photographed.
We drove for hours over the skeleton of a road, a patchwork of stones and gravel and dust, alongside herds of camels, and made our way into the provinces. Mohammed’s prayers rose above the hum of the engine as he fingered his tespih—Muslim prayer beads, similar to a rosary. I still didn’t take out my camera. On occasion I was so enraptured by the gorges and rivers and sharply sloping green hills that I allowed my scarf to slip from my forehead back to the nape of my neck, my sleeves down from my wrists to my forearm. When I refocused, I sensed Mohammed’s obvious discomfort with the sight of the skin on my wrist.