Marble Flick At Nadir Khan Hill, Kabul, Afghanistan Print

I lived in Kabul, Afghanistan for over three years while making the feature documentary, Angels Are Made Of Light. While there it became my habit to take a stills camera on our days off from filming and go through the old Kabul neighborhoods south of the Kabul river to make portraits and panoramic images. Whenever I made a portrait of someone in the neighborhood, I would always make sure to print out a copy and hand-deliver it to that person a few days later. Soon there was a steady stream of people asking to have their portraits made - more than I could have ever accommodated. It was great for them - many never had a good picture of themselves made before - and wonderful for me, since I loved making the images. Over time I was able to gain enough acceptance to make an unique series of documentary images in the old neighborhoods of Kabul, at a particular historical moment, the end of the Karzai era. Of all the places I have photographed, Afghanistan was - perhaps surprisingly - one of the most open, once people started to know you. I think the key to working there was to spend an enormous amount of time getting to know everyone in a particular area. Also, I always worked with very reliable local people as my guides and interpreters, and this was the fundamental point that kept me safe and productive during the years I spent in Afghanistan. This photograph is one of the panoramic images I made in Kabul, and it consists of some twelve exposures blended together to create a super-wide image of high resolution. This image shows the Nadir Khan hill in the background, with a cemetery in the foreground in which the children are playing marbles. This is the hill on which many of Afghanistan's past royalty are buried. If you look closely into the image you can see the boy about the flick a green marble as the other boys look on. The small action against the large scene is what makes this image attractive to me - for it's realism and juxtapositions of scale, with the details of people and livestock in the background preserved. I like to capture a multi-part image, an image that captures a scene with more than one subject, where in fact several different scenes - each with their own set of characters - is are taking place simultaneously. I enjoy images that are truly un-staged and authentically documentary in nature. Just as I work to record authentic moments in my documentary film work, I am interested in making photographs that register real life as it is happening and allow the view into the scene. Even when I make a portrait I am trying to capture not just the personality of the subject, but also them at that moment, however they may be. The idea behind all of my work in Afghanistan and the other West Asian countries where I have lived over the past decades has always 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. Every year 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. This original image is 40 x 21 inches, which includes a 2-inch white border The original printed panoramic image is 36 x 17 inches Your open edition print from SaatchiArt will be the reproduction size you select, not the original print size.

Print:Giclee on Fine Art Paper

Size:12 W x 6 H x 0.1 D in

Size with Frame:17.25 W x 11.25 H x 1.2 D in

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