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January-February, 2004
Volume 11, Number 1
Painted Warriors of Kandahar
by Jeff McMahon
Taliban
Photographs by Thomas Dworzak
Essays by Dworzak, John Lee
Anderson, Thomas Rees
Trolley Books (UK)
128 pages (illustrations), $24.95
Arriving in Kandahar in July 2001, photographer Thomas Dworzak intended to ask Afghans to sift through hidden collections of photographs from schools, studies, and families. The Taliban, who had banned photography since taking over in 1996, refused to grant Dworzak a visa, certain he would be “proselytizing.” In December 2001, during the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, he returned to Kandahar. The photographs he
collected
were commissioned by Taliban warriors wishing to commemorate their
heroism,
bravery, and (perhaps less consciously) youthful beauty during the
American
invasion in the fall of 2001. The soldiers, on the brink of defeat,
wanted a
record of who they were. Dworzak arrived to sort through the abandoned
photos
whose subjects, one of the photographers reminded him, were mostly now
dead.
Since the
mullahs had allowed no photography or depiction of mammals, simple
signage and
advertising flirted with the absurd: signs with graphic stick figures
had no
heads, a health club’s portrait of a comically Y-shaped body builder
put a map
of Afghanistan where the face should be. Even bottles of makeup had
their
smiling models (or at least their eyes) crossed out. In the case of the
colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban earlier in 2001,
destruction was thorough and often irreversible. For these more demotic
remains, scavengers such as Dworzak could at least sift through the
rubble.
Kandahar was
always a rather incongruous center for the Taliban’s moral rectitude,
having a
long tradition of music and play where, in Dworzak’s words, “the men
display an
almost feminine pleasure in the ‘sweet oriental life.’” The young
Taliban
soldiers, many of them orphans, had been trained in all-male madrasas
and not
allowed contact with the sequestered women. But where beauty is
regulated by
the state and gender roles are subject to strict dress codes, the body
glimmers
through the cracks, in this case the lens of a camera. For example,
young men
in Kandahar wore colored sandals two sizes too small because bulging
flesh was
considered sexy; they painted their eyes with kohl and placed flowers
in their
guns. And many made sure that someone took a picture of it.
In Taliban,
we are shown poignant acts of self-assertion. The cover of this
beautiful and
disturbing book shows a young man wearing an impossibly white turban,
allowing
one lock of hair to fall onto a smooth forehead. His kohl-lined eyes
play
harmonically with his black moustache and beard. In an iconic gesture
replicated by many of the soldiers, his left hand is placed over his
heart. A
gold watchband catches the light. His look challenges us, its
aggression
softened by beauty, youth, and the hand-painted blue background.
The portraits
have several formal compositional styles. The solo shots are composed
medium
close, filling the frame and grazing the top. Hand colored, these shots
resemble Warhol portraits, their deep background colors calling
attention to
their artifice, while modeling the face to gaze directly at the camera,
producing an effect that’s both seductive and challenging. These shots,
taken
in large-format black and white, then developed and hand-colored by the
studio,
were more expensive for the sitter. Other singles were shot quickly and
cheaply
in color, developed at one-hour photo stores in Pakistan, and retouched
in
Kandahar. On these, the (often multiple) backdrops are visible, and
bear no
relation to the subject. We gaze at a man standing in front of several
large
posters intended for closer shots, a cruising riverboat placed
incongruously
above a Swiss chalet. Many of these shots contain a foreground as well;
a
bench, a bureau table, fake flowers sprouting from a vase.
In one duo shot,
posed before a backdrop of camping tents and a city park, one of the
men holds
flowers, his skull cap askew, while his turbaned friend clutches beads
in a
hand stenciled with decorative markings. They look like a wedding
couple. What
relationship does this memorialize? What importance did these
decorations have
to the subjects? We have no way of knowing. A tone of serious play,
like that
of gangsta rap, resonates. The only flesh revealed in these photos is
the face
and neck, while the props include a gun, flowers, beads, a cigarette,
and a
satellite phone. A young man cradles a vase of flowers in one hand, a
pistol in
the other, while the backdrop of an alpine chalet provides a bizarrely
dislocated domestic setting.
Interspersed among
these rescued photographs are short essays by Dworzak, John Lee
Anderson, and
Thomas Rees, elegantly describing the contradictory cultural context of
these
oddly beautiful photographs. In Kandahar, Dworzak tells us, his balls
were
frequently grabbed, and he would often be caressed anonymously in a
crowd. Yet
pederasty, once considered a specialty of this region, was punished by
bulldozer by the Taliban, and Mullah Omar had ruled that troops could
not have
beardless boys.
Taliban, like
David Deitcher’s Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together
1840-1918
(2001), reveals an intimacy we have trouble interpreting; we know the
frame but
don’t recognize these pictures. These are men who are comrades, and
perhaps
more. They are also soldiers of a horrifically repressive and
puritanical
regime. How can one pose with flowers, arm around your buddy, kohl
highlighting
beautiful young eyes, and yet be a foot soldier for those who would
punish you
severely for such an abomination? It is startling to realize the risk
layered
into these shots and the triumph they contain.
Selected by a
professional photographer who understood their context, these pictures
reveal
layers of narcissism, self-protection, and poignancy. They push irony
into the
background, where it lurks but does not overwhelm. The fake flowers,
idyllic
garden backdrops, and beatific youths may remind us of Pierre et Gilles
(with
some of Jack Smith’s “flaming creatures’” thrown in), but the
idealization of
that more garishly “gay” work is mitigated here by a kind of cargo-cult
sincerity; even heavily retouched, the photos remain piercingly pure.
Taliban
distills volumes of gender, identity, and postmodern image theory with
its
sparse text and lush pictures. There are flaws: several of the duo
shots are
spread across two pages, in some cases resulting in a deeply
compromised
picture, with figures bisected by the gutter and the unity spoiled. Yet
while
the book’s small size obstructs some of the photographs, this makes it
affordable and portable, its images accessible to a wide audience. A
regime
devoted to obliterating the human image suffers a final defeat, as
Taliban
remains one of the few things of beauty pulled from the wreckage of its
rule in
Afghanistan.
Jeff McMahon is a performer and writer living in New York and Phoenix and currently teaching at Arizona State University.
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