Thomas Dworzak - Taliban - 2003

In Kandahar, the Pashtun city long famous for its oriental festivities, where Mullah Omar had his last headquarters, there is a tradition of men in high-heeled sandals, black-painted eyes, and henna-dyed beards and fingernails. Taliban fighters were evidently vain too, for despite the ban, they readily had their portraits taken and their photos artfully retouched. MAGNUM photographer Thomas Dworzak, a war correspondent in Afghanistan for The New Yorker, discovered these photographs a few days after the Taliban fled Kandahar. They were hanging in the windows of camera shops, right next to pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio, Bruce Lee, and Ahmed Shah Massoud. The backgrounds of the simpler photos are Swiss panoramas. In their hands, the Taliban fighters are holding a Kalashnikov or a pot of plastic flowers. Some are alone, others with a friend. Some sit stiffly next to each other, others hold hands affectionately. There were certainly murderers among them. Yet these images reveal them as yearning individuals, their black-painted eyes reminiscent of the stars of the silent film era. As they fled, they left behind these curious, almost absurd, yet touching documents of their presence.