How does one photograph a story that has not yet occurred? How does one evoke a sense of what might happen, or of what could?
This was the challenge for the Afghan-Swiss photographer Zalmaï: to capture the sense of foreboding that, as Dexter Filkins writes in this week’s issue, permeates Afghanistan as American troops prepare to withdraw. “People forget that almost thirty million people live in Afghanistan,” Zalmaï told me from Kabul. “Yet twenty thousand Taliban can completely destroy these thirty million lives. How Afghanistan will avoid falling into civil war again, I just don’t know.”
Zalmaï’s work is currently on display in Kabul as part of Documenta, an internationally renowned exhibition series that occurs every five years. Click-through for a slideshow of his images: http://nyr.kr/KOkx0j
American reporting is problematic throughout the third world, but because the American military/industrial/financial/academic/media complex is so directly implicated in the Middle East, the consequences of such bad reporting are more significant. Journalists end up serving as propagandists justifying the killing of innocent people instead of a voice for those innocent people. Our job should not be about speaking truth to power. Those in power know the truth, they just don’t care, and they serve systems greater than themselves anyway. It’s about speaking truth to the people, to those not in power, in order to empower them, or unfortunately, sometimes to leave them feeling bitter and cynical.
