Simon Norfolk, born in Lagos, Nigeria (1963), studied documental photography in Newport and worked as a photojournalist until the 1990s when he is principally occupied with depicting genocide. He traveled a.o. to Ruanda, Bosnia, Palestina, and Afghanistan. The pictures below come from his photobook Afghanistan: Chronotopian published in 2002 for which he received the European Publisher Award.
Although being initially a photojournalist, Norfolk does not capture the very destruction process, pain, blood, and stuff. Rather, he remains out of action and photographs the traces left by the war in the landscape, the approach practiced already in the 1980s by Sophie Ristelhueber. Kind of missed-decisive-moment photography.
In Afghanistan, ravaged by wars for dozens of years, people do not know other conditions than ruins. The wars have turned this country into a large museum of abandoned military equipment and the only life that Afghanis know is led between skeletons of buildings, tanks, and airplanes. The preface to the book cites Michail Bakhtin, who called this kind of landscape a "chronotype": a place that allows movement through space and time simultaneously, a place that displays the „layeredness“ of time.
