Private Story
Copy - Accidental Exposures
2021 marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, an event marked by President Biden’s announcement in April that he will pull out U.S. troops this year: “I’m now the fourth United States President to preside over American troop presence in Afghanistan: two Republicans, two Democrats. I will not pass this responsibility on to a fifth.”
My first reaction to his speech was recalling a conversation I had with Russian photographer and friend Mikhail Evstafiev back in 2001 after it appeared the U.S. had achieved a stunning victory. In the 1980s, he had served and fought in Afghanistan with the Soviet army during its decade-long brutal war and occupation. “The U.S. will face the same humiliation we did,” he told me.
Accidental Exposures is a singular look at this country as it was in 2001, a year in which I traveled to Afghanistan twice, first in the early part of the year, before 9/11, and then again after the U.S. launched what would become the longest war in its history. The exhibition will center on ten images I shot on a single roll of film during my second trip – a roll of film I originally considered a disappointing mistake because in the chaos of war I had accidentally double-exposed it, obscuring the journalistic evidence and significance of each image. Nineteen years later, however, while going through my archives in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, I came across the roll again. Curious, I took another look and saw the images in a new and different light: the chance layering of images had revealed the complexity of a people and country turned upside down by an event (9/11) that happened halfway around the world. Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit us in similar way— from beyond our borders and beyond our control. Those images, along the overall story of my two trips to Afghanistan, were the basis for a story that The Washington Post Sunday Magazine published last year. The exhibition will expand on that and be supplemented by news clippings and first-hand accounts, both written and audio.
In addition to the ten large prints, the exhibition will feature approximately 80 other photographs made during these trips in Afghanistan. Taken together, the images offer a rare perspective in that few journalists had traveled to Afghanistan before 9/11, when the country was largely held by the Taliban and was of little news interest to Americans, even though it was suffering its worst drought in memory and a devastating civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. The fact that I returned later that year allowed me unique access to chronicle how 9/11 would shape Afghanistan for the next twenty years.
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