Artist Statement
The Irish photographer John Burke was a superb war photographer whose eloquent and beautiful photographs of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) form a most extraordinary record, and yet he is virtually unknown. Using unwieldy wet-plate collodion negatives and huge wooden cameras he shot landscapes, battlefields, archaeological sites, street scenes, portraits of British officers and ethnological group
portraits of Afghans in what amounts to a record of an Imperial encounter which is both tremendously broad and yet suffused with a delicate
humanism. These were the first ever pictures made in Afghanistan.
For the first time since 2001, when he produced the book 'Afghanistan; chronotopia,' the artist Simon Norfolk returned to that country over the winter of 2010/11 to follow in John Burke's footsteps. Very loosely re-photographic, the new work is more of an Improvisation On A Theme By John Burke - looking at what you get when you dump half a trillion US war dollars on an impoverished and broken country like Afghanistan. The work is presented as an artistic collaboration between Burke and Norfolk, (except that one of them is dead,) and features Burke pictures never before shown as well as Simon's new pictures from Kabul and Helmand.
As Norfolk writes in the accompanying book's Introduction:
'The situation in Afghanistan is especially sad now. The Americans are desperate to leave and are virtually flinging money out of helicopters as they rush for the exits before the next Presidential election cycle begins. Something like $500 billion has been spent. The Americans need to cement into power that small (lavishly upholstered) section of society they have anointed with the task of presiding after they depart; and
keeping them there long enough to not make the departure look embarrassingly precipitate. To that end two kinds of cities are being built and I've prepared the project as a kind of Tale of Two Cities with the citizens in the centre. But these two kinds of cities are twisted and
bastardised. In the traditional city, like Kabul, the economy is an extraordinary shape. No end of money is being thrown at the security state – money can't be spent fast enough on barracks, helicopter training programmes, police stations, secret police battalions and torture centres.
The city is littered with blast walls, closed roads and road blocks and one is reminded of how few examples there are in history of these kinds of states being built and then rolling themselves back when the emergency rescinds. Below this in the economy there is a huge cavity; where one would expect to see 'normal' economic activity – factories, jobs, hospitals, bridges etc – this is almost completely absent. Who would
invest in these things when nobody knows if the Taliban will be back in government in a few years? But the very bottom of the economy is
prospering: land theft, drug money and embezzlement from military and government contracts is leaking billions into the bottom of the
economy. What isn't exported to Dubai or Zurich is spent on conspicuous consumption known as 'narcotecture.' Usually built on stolen land, surrounded by high walls and often occupied by Internationals paying $20,000/month rents; these are simply the most ostentatious and
tasteless display of Kabul's twisted makeup.
'The second kind of new bastardised cities being created are the mega-bases being built by the occupying military, like Camp Leatherneck/Camp Bastion and Kandahar Air Base. If 'camp' makes them sound temporary and dinky then you're very wrong; the former is home to 26,000 US marines; the latter (the biggest NATO airbase in the world,) has a busier airport than London Gatwick and both of them are pouring concrete and laying asphalt like they have plans for a long stay after the 2014 'deadline.'
A Tale of Two Cities then, both of them sick and untenable; fluffed up on injections of foreign money and both of them facing imminent
collapse.'

 

Cross-Reference