Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan

In October 2010, Simon Norfolk began a series of new photographs in Afghanistan, which takes its cue from the work of nineteenth-century British photographer John Burke.

A security guard's booth at the newly restored Ikhtiaruddin citadel, Herat. Copyright Simon Norfolk

Norfolk’s photographs reimagine or respond to Burke’s Afghan war scenes in the context of the contemporary conflict. Conceived as a collaborative project with Burke across time, this new body of work is presented alongside Burke’s original portfolios. The exhibition takes place in conjunction with an earlier complementary exhibition in March 2011 at the Queen’s Palace in the Baghe Babur garden in Kabul, supported by The World Collections Programme and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which resulted from a series of workshops with Afghan photographers, featuring work by Fardin Waezi and Burke alongside Norfolk’s own work.

Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan remain open at the Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern in London until July 10, 2011.

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The Old Mikrorayon part of Kabul behind Ghazi Stadium. Copyright Simon Norfolk

Jaw Aka Faizal Nahman and his daughter Nono from Bamiyan province, now living in an improvised plastic shelter in the ruined gardens of Darulaman Palace. Built in the 1920s to house an Afghan parliament, 'Darul Aman' translates as 'abode of peace'. Kabul, 2010 40x53" from an edition of 7 © Simon Norfolk

Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan remains open at the Level 2 Gallery, Tate Modern in London until July 10, 2011.

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SIMON NORFOLK

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.