A Madrasa In Deh Sabz - Limited Edition of 3 Photograph

This is a companion to the image titled Madrasa Student. Both photographs were made in Deh Sabz District, a short drive northwest of Kabul, Afghanistan, in January, 2014. I lived in Kabul for over three years, making the documentary film Angels Are Made Of Light. While there I also made a series of extremely detailed panoramic images - mostly of street life in Kabul. The pictures are both beautiful to look at as art and also serve as the most detailed and revealing documentary images in existence of Afghanistan during this moment in history - the end of the Karzai era. 

This is one of the few panoramic images I made outside of Kabul, in the vast Afghan countryside. In this case, I was taking a day off from filming on my documentary and road tripping with my friend Habibuddin Shaban through the district of Deh Sabz, northwest of Kabul. Habib lives in the United States now, but at the time he was working with me as an intrepid guide. The area contains many enormous brick kilns, and I had thought of making a photograph of one of them. But photographing brick-making is all about timing - you need to be there at the right part of the process - and as we drove along the desolate outskirts of Deh Sabz District we failed to find an active kiln. We happened on a shrine complex surrounded by a crumbling mud brick wall, and in the courtyard, a small madrasa run by conservative Islamic studies teachers. I was probably the first American to come to their door, and it took about an hour of conversation and back and forth - with Habibuddin doing all the convincing. Because he is himself religious - and very frank and open, and not from wealth - Habib was able to successfully argue that what we wanted to do - make a photograph of the madrasa classroom - was not un-Islamic. Finally the Qur'an teachers allowed us to make a photograph inside the madrasa. But only one photograph. In Afghanistan it's very common for boys to be sent to a madrasa - often in addition to attending a regular government school - because at the madrasa they will gain literacy in the Arabic alphabet in order to recite the Qur'an. We were led into the classroom where some thirty-four boys sat on the carpet around a metal stove, intently reading the Qur’an and rocking their bodies back and forth in concentration. Winter sunlight filtered through large windows covered in plastic for extra insulation. The effect was something like a Rembrandt painting, and I immediately felt the scene was something special. It required some eight exposures, taken in rapid succession, to capture the full width of the image. As soon as I had taken the photograph we were ushered out by the mullahs. Only later did I see that I had been successful in recording the scene. 

A few weeks later we returned to the madrasa with an early version of the image mounted on a wooden board, which I gave them as a gift. Generally figurative art is frowned upon by fundamentalist religion teachers, but in this case they were so taken by the beauty of the image that they accepted the picture with obvious delight and spent an hour giving us tea and telling us about life in the district. The idea behind all of my work in Afghanistan and the other West Asian countries where I have lived over the past decades has been to express to a broader audience the beautiful humanity that I found all around me. The people in these countries have suffered greatly through various wars and conflicts, but their character remains stronger than ever. My films and photographs are love poems to my friends and all the people I met and worked with, who collaborated with me to immortalize them in stills and in motion. A portion of my income goes to support people I have filmed and worked with in the past, their education and the upkeep of their families. The image A Madrasa In Deh Sabz is offered as an oversized 44 x 96 inch signed print on Hahnemühle paper in an edition limited to three at this museum print size. Unframed. Unmounted. Rendered on museum quality Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper, printed by a fine art printer using archival inks in the United States. About the paper: Hahnemühle papers are designed for archival storage are acid-free, which makes them highly resistant to ageing. The paper is also lignin-free, which means it should consist of linters or alpha-cellulose. Lignin-free paper does not yellow.

Photography:Color on Paper

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:3

Size:96 W x 44 H x 0.1 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.