Simon Norfolk went to Afghanistan in 2001 and came back with photographs that do not look like war reportage. His subject is the country’s landscape after more than two decades of overlapping conflict, and his method is closer to archaeology than to journalism: he reads the ground itself, where Soviet, Mujaheddin, Taliban and American destruction have settled into layers, one era of ruin resting upon another. In Kabul, he has written, a single street can feel like a museum of the archaeology of war. The comparison he reaches for is Schliemann at Troy, digging down through nine buried cities.
The photographs are made in colour and at a contemplative scale, and the book’s design supports that patience. Published by Dewi Lewis in 2002 as a hardback of 96 pages with 47 colour plates, and measuring roughly 28.5 by 32 centimetres, Afghanistan gives the pictures room to work as landscapes first and as documents second. Norfolk’s own frame of reference is unexpectedly literary: he has said that these mountains and deserts first entered his imagination through an illustrated children’s Bible, as the terrain behind David and Goliath, and as the setting he pictured for Armageddon. That admission clarifies what the pictures are doing. They are not neutral records; they are landscapes seen through the pressure of inherited myth, which is precisely why the destruction in them registers as something other than a news event.
The book received the Leica-sponsored European Publishers Award for Photography in 2002, and an exhibition began touring the United States the same year. It followed Norfolk’s earlier landscape work on genocide and memory, and it precedes the collaborative volume Burke + Norfolk. For a collector, the case rests on the work’s argument rather than on any claim about scarcity: this is an early, fully realised statement of Norfolk’s central preoccupation, made at a moment when the subject was urgent and the photographer’s distance from daily reporting was already deliberate. The layering he describes in the Afghan ground is also the structure of the book.
