Haute qualité Taliban (couverture rigide, 2003) photographies bizarres collectées par Thomas Dworzak

TALIBAN, hardcover, 2003. Glamour shots of a very unusual nature.

Kandahar, a city of Pashtuns noted for their gaiety, so to speak, where Mullah Omar had made his final headquarters, has traditions of men in high-heeled sandals, with make-up of kohl and painted nails like sultry silent-movie stars. They liked to have their pictures taken and, because the Taliban most certainly needed passports, their vanities were accomodated in the hole-in-the-wall photo shops that exist in downtown Kandahar. Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak, on war assignment for the New Yorker, discovered their photographs days after they had fled the city. They hung among portraits of Bruce Lee, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ahmed Shah Massoud, their faces retouched by the artful brushwork of the photographer. As exotic backdrops the subjects have chosen chalets in the Swiss Alps, where the mountains are green and Julie Andrews sings, rather than the forbidding grey and brown of their own country. Some are alone, others with a friend or a Kalashnikov, with garish colours stroked into the theme, along with flowers. They were the killers who have fled, leaving behind an absurd record of their presence.

These portraits of Taliban soldiers were collected by Thomas Dworzak during his coverage of the fall of the Taliban regime in 2002. It is thought that most of these pictures are from Taliban members who had them taken in early November 2001, but could not pick them up as they had to flee the advancing opposition and United States' bombing.

The Taliban interpretation of Islamic rules stated photography or any depiction of living beings (humans or mammals) was illegal. But when passport photography was re-allowed, some Taliban members would ask to pose for a more flattering, retouched portrait secretly taken in the back room of the studio. The pictures were taken by Afghan photographers in Kandahar at the studios ‘Shah Zadah' (‘Son of the King/Shah'), ‘Roshan' (‘Light') and ‘Nazir Photographer'.

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