Afghanistan Chronotopia: Landscapes of the Destruction of Afghanistan

Winner of the European Publishers Award for Photography 2002

This year's winner of the European Publishers Award for Photography is London based photographer Simon Norfolk. The work has already received massive critical acclaim and more than a dozen simultaneous exhibitions are scheduled throughout the world from Autumn 2002 in venues including Hereford Photography Festival; Side Gallery, Newcastle; Photofusion, London; Trace Gallery, Weymouth, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool; Museum of Architecture, Frankfurt, Germany; The Halsey Gallery, South Carolina, USA; Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, USA; Benham Gallery, Seattle, USA.

"Afghanistan is unlike Sarajevo or Kigali or any other war-ravaged landscape I have ever photographed. In Kabul in particular, the devastation has a bizarre layering; the different destructive eras lying on top of each other. I was reminded of the story of Schliemann?s discovery of the remains of the classical city of Troy in the 1870s; digging down, he found nine cities layered upon each other, each one in its turn rebuilt and destroyed. Walking a Kabul street can be like walking through a Museum of the Archaeology of War — different moments of destruction lie like sediment on top of each other. There are places near Bagram Air Base or on the Shomali Plain where the front line has passed back and forth eight or nine times — each leaving a deadly flotsam of destroyed homes and fields seeded with landmines.

"The landscapes of Afghanistan are the scenes that I knew first from the Illustrated Children?s Bible given to me by my parents when I was a child. When David battled Goliath, these mountains and deserts were behind them. When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, these fauna and flora were over his shoulders. More accurately, these landscapes are how my childish imagination pictured the Apocalypse or Armageddon; utter destruction on a massive, Babylonian scale bathed in the crystal light of a desert sunrise." — Simon Norfolk

The photographs in this volume seek to show something of the scale of the problems facing Afghanistan as it tries to recover from the war of 2002.

Simon Norfolk?s photographs have appeared in titles as varied as the New York Times Magazine, the Sunday Times Magazine, the South China Morning Post, and La Republicca Magazine — and in 2001 he won a prestigious World Press Award. His first book For Most Of It I Have No Words (Dewi Lewis Publishing), about the landscapes of the places that have seen Genocide, was published in 1998 to wide acclaim including praise from the novelist Anne Michaels and from Louise Arbour, Chief Prosecutor of the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.