Thomas Dworzak - Taliban - 2002

In Kandahar, the Pashtun city long famed for its oriental splendors, where Mullah Omar had his last headquarters, there is the tradition of men in high-heeled sandals and blackened eyes, with henna-dyed beards and fingernails. Obviously, Taliban fighters were vain as well, for they readily allowed themselves to be photographed and had their photos artistically retouched despite the ban. Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak, who served as a war photographer for The New Yorker in Afghanistan, discovered these photographs a few days after the Taliban had fled Kandahar. They hung in the windows of photography shops, right next to pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio, Bruce Lee, and Ahmed Shah Massoud. The backgrounds of the simpler photos are Swiss panoramas. In the fighters’ hands they hold a Kalashnikov or a pot of plastic flowers. Some are alone, others with a friend. Some sit stiffly side by side, others hold hands with tenderness. Among them were surely murderers. And yet they reveal themselves with these images as longing individuals, who, with their blackened eyes, recall the stars of the silent film era. In their flight, they left behind these curious, almost absurd and yet touching documents of their presence.