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ref:Haven't we been here before? | Art and design | The Guardian
Salaam......
Haven't we been here before?
Simon Norfolk pairs photographs of an occupied Afghanistan from 130 years ago and today. What can the past teach us about the future, wonders Ian Jack
Share Ian Jack The Guardian, Saturday 23 April 2011 Article history
Landholders and labourers. Photograph: Wilson Centre for Photography
A team from the mine detection centre, Kabul. Photograph: © Simon Norfolk Then-and-now contrasts are a favourite photographic trope, and understandably so: a Japanese fishing town is full of cheerful houses in one image and flattened to a mess of brown wreckage in the next. A tsunami has blotted out a prosperous corner of human civilisation almost with the speed of a camera shutter. The effect is humbling but also (if the viewer has no personal stake in the scene) compelling: wow! So this is what nature can do! The photographs on these pages, however, are paired to a different effect. They're separated by 130 years, but rather than illustrating change, their point is to show how, in Afghanistan, a wheel has turned to make things very much the same. This isn't the past destroyed but the past repeated, which, as the philosopher George Santayana famously instructs us, is the unfortunate price of forgetting.
Simon Norfolk took the more recent sequence in 2010. As a photographer, the show-through of the past into the present has always interested him. He first photographed Afghanistan in 2001, when the US began to bomb the country as the prelude to the military invasion codenamed Operation Enduring Freedom that removed the Taliban government in Kabul and, less successfully, sought to find and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. As the years went by, the consequences of this decision multiplied there are now about 140,000 foreign military personnel quartered in Afghanistan and the conflict has killed thousands on either side. Norfolk wanted to return, but couldn't find a good enough reason. He isn't, as he says, one of those "tousled-scarf photo-journalists" who enjoys being embedded with troops; as an "embed", you naturally begin to sympathise with the people who feed, shelter and protect you, and Norfolk says he disagrees with everything they represent, which in his word is "imperialism".
Then, at the National Media Museum in Bradford, he saw an album of pictures by the Victorian photographer John Burke, and knew immediately why he had to go back. Burke accompanied the British expeditionary force that between 1878 and 1880 fought the second Anglo-Afghan war. His photographs are almost certainly the first to be taken inside Afghanistan, but very little is known about him outside an elementary biography. He was born in Ireland in the early 1840s and as a boy sailed to India with his father, who served in the Royal Artillery. In India, he joined his father's regiment as an apothecary and learned the skills of chemical mixing that recommended him to William Baker, a retired army sergeant (and, like Burke, an Irishman) who'd set himself up as a photographer with studios in the British military settlements at Rawalpindi and Peshawar and in the nearby hill station, Murree, which officials of the Raj in the North West Frontier used for their rest and recreation. Baker took on Burke as an apprentice and by the late 1860s they were a partnership, Baker & Burke, that was busily recording the personalities and architecture of Britain's Indian Empire at the height of its power. To enhance, or at least preserve, this power, an army of 40,000 British and Indian troops invaded Afghanistan in 1878 when it seemed likely that Russia would increase its influence with the ruling family in Kabul. The same fear of Russian expansion prompted the first Anglo-Afghan war 40 years earlier, which ended for the British in catastrophic retreat.
The new war had a happier outcome for the invaders. A defeat at Maiwand, where some of Britain's Afghan supporters unsportingly changed sides, was followed by General (later Lord) Roberts's triumph at Kandahar. Afghanistan ceded control of its external relations to Britain and agreed to abide by new frontiers that gave some eastern parts of the country to British India. The British then withdrew. Afghan casualties amounted to 12,700 dead and wounded as against 15,600 on the British side. Burke's photographs show none of this bloodshed; his equipment was heavy and cumbersome, the Afghan campaign depended on route marches across hard terrain, and in any case his pictures were intended as cheerful mementoes of an imperial feat of arms in an exotic, faraway country. But he was a gifted photographer with an eye for a wide range of subjects landscapes as well as soldiers and tribesmen and his pictures inspired Norfolk to follow in his footsteps, not yard by yard and frame for frame, but to see how far the encounter between the occupying army and the native population had repeated itself. That's best left to the pictures to say, but there is at least one innovation that can be understood as evidence of progress. Women appear in Norfolk's pictures, including a female basketball team. No Muslim woman appears in Burke's; the only women he photographed were Hindu "Nautch" girls, imported to entertain Afghanistan's rulers and their feudal courts.
When Norfolk talked to British soldiers on his trip last year, none seemed to know of the previous occupations (there was a third Anglo-Afghan war in 1919) and were "surprised and rather interested" when he told them the history. Afghanis, on the other hand, knew all about Ayub Khan's victory at Maiwand, which in Pashtun legend is the equivalent of Trafalgar or Waterloo. Over the past 10 years, 363 troops from the UK have died in Afghanistan out of a toll of more than 2,300 dead from the coalition forces as a whole. The casualty count among civilians, Taliban fighters and Afghan government soldiers and police is far higher. Put all sides together, and a respectable estimate approaches 70,000 killed and wounded.
Burke died of cirrhosis in Lahore in 1899. When Norfolk told me this, I remembered my own great-grandfather. Like Burke, he was Irish. Like Burke, he sailed to India with the Royal Artillery, rising to sergeant major and, if we believe the evidence of his Afghan medal, tramping out of barracks to join the second Afghan war. Like Burke, he died in the last years of the 19th century of cirrhosis or something very like it: "acute alcohol poisoning" is on the death certificate. His post-Afghanistan, post-army life doesn't seem to have been easy. He went to live in a Fife mining village, and family legend puts him at one stage driving the cart that took animal corpses to the knacker's yard. Death came in a crowded lodging house in Edinburgh, where he worked in a whisky warehouse.
When we look at these pictures by Burke and Norfolk, we might also consider the uncertain futures of the people in them, particularly those in uniform. Occupiers they may be, but what becomes of them once the occupation is over? Will that pattern, too, be repeated?
These photographs are taken from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan, by John Burke and Simon Norfolk, published on 5 May by Dewi Lewis Publishing at £40. To order a copy for £32, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. An exhibition of the pictures will be at Tate Modern, London SE1, from 6 May-10 July; go to tate.org.uk for details.
Salaam......
Haven't we been here before?
Simon Norfolk pairs photographs of an occupied Afghanistan from 130 years ago and today. What can the past teach us about the future, wonders Ian Jack
Share Ian Jack The Guardian, Saturday 23 April 2011 Article history
Landholders and labourers. Photograph: Wilson Centre for Photography
A team from the mine detection centre, Kabul. Photograph: © Simon Norfolk Then-and-now contrasts are a favourite photographic trope, and understandably so: a Japanese fishing town is full of cheerful houses in one image and flattened to a mess of brown wreckage in the next. A tsunami has blotted out a prosperous corner of human civilisation almost with the speed of a camera shutter. The effect is humbling but also (if the viewer has no personal stake in the scene) compelling: wow! So this is what nature can do! The photographs on these pages, however, are paired to a different effect. They're separated by 130 years, but rather than illustrating change, their point is to show how, in Afghanistan, a wheel has turned to make things very much the same. This isn't the past destroyed but the past repeated, which, as the philosopher George Santayana famously instructs us, is the unfortunate price of forgetting.
Simon Norfolk took the more recent sequence in 2010. As a photographer, the show-through of the past into the present has always interested him. He first photographed Afghanistan in 2001, when the US began to bomb the country as the prelude to the military invasion codenamed Operation Enduring Freedom that removed the Taliban government in Kabul and, less successfully, sought to find and capture or kill Osama bin Laden. As the years went by, the consequences of this decision multiplied there are now about 140,000 foreign military personnel quartered in Afghanistan and the conflict has killed thousands on either side. Norfolk wanted to return, but couldn't find a good enough reason. He isn't, as he says, one of those "tousled-scarf photo-journalists" who enjoys being embedded with troops; as an "embed", you naturally begin to sympathise with the people who feed, shelter and protect you, and Norfolk says he disagrees with everything they represent, which in his word is "imperialism".
Then, at the National Media Museum in Bradford, he saw an album of pictures by the Victorian photographer John Burke, and knew immediately why he had to go back. Burke accompanied the British expeditionary force that between 1878 and 1880 fought the second Anglo-Afghan war. His photographs are almost certainly the first to be taken inside Afghanistan, but very little is known about him outside an elementary biography. He was born in Ireland in the early 1840s and as a boy sailed to India with his father, who served in the Royal Artillery. In India, he joined his father's regiment as an apothecary and learned the skills of chemical mixing that recommended him to William Baker, a retired army sergeant (and, like Burke, an Irishman) who'd set himself up as a photographer with studios in the British military settlements at Rawalpindi and Peshawar and in the nearby hill station, Murree, which officials of the Raj in the North West Frontier used for their rest and recreation. Baker took on Burke as an apprentice and by the late 1860s they were a partnership, Baker & Burke, that was busily recording the personalities and architecture of Britain's Indian Empire at the height of its power. To enhance, or at least preserve, this power, an army of 40,000 British and Indian troops invaded Afghanistan in 1878 when it seemed likely that Russia would increase its influence with the ruling family in Kabul. The same fear of Russian expansion prompted the first Anglo-Afghan war 40 years earlier, which ended for the British in catastrophic retreat.
The new war had a happier outcome for the invaders. A defeat at Maiwand, where some of Britain's Afghan supporters unsportingly changed sides, was followed by General (later Lord) Roberts's triumph at Kandahar. Afghanistan ceded control of its external relations to Britain and agreed to abide by new frontiers that gave some eastern parts of the country to British India. The British then withdrew. Afghan casualties amounted to 12,700 dead and wounded as against 15,600 on the British side. Burke's photographs show none of this bloodshed; his equipment was heavy and cumbersome, the Afghan campaign depended on route marches across hard terrain, and in any case his pictures were intended as cheerful mementoes of an imperial feat of arms in an exotic, faraway country. But he was a gifted photographer with an eye for a wide range of subjects landscapes as well as soldiers and tribesmen and his pictures inspired Norfolk to follow in his footsteps, not yard by yard and frame for frame, but to see how far the encounter between the occupying army and the native population had repeated itself. That's best left to the pictures to say, but there is at least one innovation that can be understood as evidence of progress. Women appear in Norfolk's pictures, including a female basketball team. No Muslim woman appears in Burke's; the only women he photographed were Hindu "Nautch" girls, imported to entertain Afghanistan's rulers and their feudal courts.
When Norfolk talked to British soldiers on his trip last year, none seemed to know of the previous occupations (there was a third Anglo-Afghan war in 1919) and were "surprised and rather interested" when he told them the history. Afghanis, on the other hand, knew all about Ayub Khan's victory at Maiwand, which in Pashtun legend is the equivalent of Trafalgar or Waterloo. Over the past 10 years, 363 troops from the UK have died in Afghanistan out of a toll of more than 2,300 dead from the coalition forces as a whole. The casualty count among civilians, Taliban fighters and Afghan government soldiers and police is far higher. Put all sides together, and a respectable estimate approaches 70,000 killed and wounded.
Burke died of cirrhosis in Lahore in 1899. When Norfolk told me this, I remembered my own great-grandfather. Like Burke, he was Irish. Like Burke, he sailed to India with the Royal Artillery, rising to sergeant major and, if we believe the evidence of his Afghan medal, tramping out of barracks to join the second Afghan war. Like Burke, he died in the last years of the 19th century of cirrhosis or something very like it: "acute alcohol poisoning" is on the death certificate. His post-Afghanistan, post-army life doesn't seem to have been easy. He went to live in a Fife mining village, and family legend puts him at one stage driving the cart that took animal corpses to the knacker's yard. Death came in a crowded lodging house in Edinburgh, where he worked in a whisky warehouse.
When we look at these pictures by Burke and Norfolk, we might also consider the uncertain futures of the people in them, particularly those in uniform. Occupiers they may be, but what becomes of them once the occupation is over? Will that pattern, too, be repeated?
These photographs are taken from Burke + Norfolk: Photographs From The War In Afghanistan, by John Burke and Simon Norfolk, published on 5 May by Dewi Lewis Publishing at £40. To order a copy for £32, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. An exhibition of the pictures will be at Tate Modern, London SE1, from 6 May-10 July; go to tate.org.uk for details.
