What was your method to shoot the book?
Some things carry over from street-style photography. You’re focusing on people and what you’re seeing in style, but the environment is totally different. Especially the second trip, you’re dealing with a kind of non-permissive environment where you have multiple parties that may not want you around, may not want you taking photos, may view you as a threat, may view you as someone they want to kidnap or injure or kill, so that aspect of it is really different.
I’d worked a little bit in conflict environments before, in Iraq in 2017, so I’d had some experience of that. My approach the first time was just to be as local as I possibly could. The country was destabilizing very quickly at that point and the only place you could really work as a photojournalist with this kind of work was Kabul itself.
Courtesy of Robert Spangle
So I dressed as a local, I studied Dari [one of Afghanistan’s two major dialects]…I either walked everywhere or I took a bicycle because this was actually the safest way to get around. Vehicles were getting targeted, especially vehicles that looked like they had Westerners or government types in them. In Kabul, really, only poor people ride bicycles: you don’t get stopped at check points and you don’t get caught up in foot traffic either.
The second trip [in 2022] was under the Taliban. They’d been in power for about 10 months by the time I got there and that was a different environment. The Taliban was in total control—they know you’re a foreigner and you have to register with them. You have an armed minder with you anytime you’re not in Kabul. You need their express written permission to go anywhere and meet with anyone. I still very much dressed like a local then, but when you have a minder around you and a fixer and a driver it’s obvious pretty quickly that you’re not from whatever town you’re in. But the advantage of that second trip was that we could go see much more of the country.
Eric Twardzik
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