"Kandahar, a city of Pashtuns noted for their gaiety, where Mullah Omar had made his final headquarters, has traditions of men in high-heeled sandals, with make-up of khol and painted nails like the sultry silent-movie stars. They liked to have their pictures taken and, because the Taliban most certainly needed passports, their vanities were accommodated in the hole-in-the-wall photo shops that existed in downtown Kandahar. The photos presented here represent a selection recovered by Dworzak after the war from such studios in downtown Kandahar, the center of Taliban power. According to him, the photographers working there had a busy clandestine business producing these flamboyant portraits for the Taliban fighters who had come in to sit for their official ID pictures. As journalist Jon Lee Anderson notes in his introduction to Taliban, a book published by Trolley Press featuring a selection of the images, the members of the Pashtun tribe (to which Mullah Omar belonged) and particularly those in the Kandahar area, are known for their surprisingly showy personal appearances; often sporting dyed hair and beards, favoring colorfully ornamented heeled sandals, decorating their fingernails and toenails with henna, and outlining their eyes in dark kohl. The images brought out of Kandahar by Dworzak—featuring men alone and in playful, sometimes affectionate groups, treated with romantic flourishes of florid hand-coloration or simply posed before cheerful Alpine backdrops with feminizing floral accessories—produce an extraordinarily intimate and utterly counterintuitive portrait of an enemy that even two years later has remained largely invisible to Western eyes. According to Dworzak, none of the portrait photographers “seemed to think that the pictures were either contradictory or hypocritical of the Taliban, nor as dissident or of any particular value… As there was little chance that the Taliban would return to collect the photographs, the studios were happy to sell them.” As one of the photo studio owners told Dworzak, “Most of them are dead anyway.” 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 Di Caprio 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. Among them were killers who have fled, leaving behind an absurd record of their presence." Rare book, a must for any contemporary photo book collection. Very condition, with some shelf wear to covers. Check photos please.