It was 1979 when I decided I needed a break from my graduate school. I treated my decision as an excuse to travel with my trusty Canon AE-1 and forty roles of Tri-X. During that year I went as far as Nepal but my four months in Afghanistan left some of the deepest impressions. It was an Afghanistan that no longer exists. I know for a fact three of the people in these four-decade-old images are deceased and I suspect all the others are too. Like them, their former homeland is gone, and the new one is yet to be born.
In 1979, it was still a few months before the Russians would invade, a few years before the Taliban, and a few more years before the coalition forces of the West would bomb and occupy Afghanistan. It was in Herat where I first saw women covered head-to-foot in their pleated burqas.
This man, a beggar perhaps, was sitting in the shade outside the Kabul souk. Staring and motionless on a camel-hide cushion, he held an unlit match that he would eventually strike and apply to the contents of the clay bowl atop the water pipe. Soon the watermelon between his feet might bring him a moment of pleasure…
