My Afghanistan by Stephen Dupont

18 Sep

173rd Airbourne Gonbad Village Shawali Kot, 2005

It's challenging and exciting to talk about Stephen Dupont because he encompasses various qualities, from being a documentary photographer and conflict expert to being an artist capable of creating art through his images. His statements are filled with strong emotions, wisdom, and simplicity. While empathy is often discussed today, it's rarely seen in action. Stephen, however, is an empathetic photographer who genuinely feels for the people he photographs.

We asked for his insights on the topic of Afghanistan, and he shared a moving reflection that we are excited to share with you.

Having spent two decades photographing there, I am left now with vivid memories and thousands of images of the people and place I grew to love. Moments — that’s all I can tell you about. Not the big picture, but the small pictures that impacted me personally, and might illuminate the Afghan people and their culture and history, not a news feed or a statistic.

I want to share some of these memories with you through a few of the photographs I made over the years, tell you something about my private thoughts and feelings at the times these moments were captured. I can’t offer a solution to the problems of Afghanistan, their future or the questionable legacy left behind after Australia and the West’s twenty-year war odyssey. But what I can offer is respect for the beauty and tragedy of the place Afghans call home.

It all began in 1993 with a wedding ceremony. But this was no ordinary celebration. It was my first trip to Afghanistan and I went to cover a refugee crisis in the north of the country. A civil war in neighbouring Tajikistan forced tens of thousands to flee to safety, with the irony that safety meant living in arctic conditions in a desert of death. It was so cold that I could only take a few frames at a time before I had to stuff my hands deep inside my thermals again. Men were busy digging great big holes in the earth to cover with tents or small ones for the many dead. People huddled around fires cooking and offered me the little food they had. Hospitality to guests is an understatement over there. I wandered across the dusty plains like a lost explorer, searching for visions. The photograph I always go back to is of a wedding ceremony inside the camp. It was the only normal thing I saw that day, the only time I saw a smile and heard a laugh.

Disguised as a doctor for MSF (Doctor’s Without Borders), I smuggled my camera gear in a car as we drove from Mazar in the north to the capital Kabul, avoiding the many militia road blocks by driving fast and tossing thousands of Afghani bank notes out of the windows so the soldiers would go for the money and not shoot us. We made it after a couple of days driving, arriving in what I can only describe was an all out bombing war. The country was at war with itself, a legacy of its communist days and a war with Russia, and different waring factions had divided the city into a serrated maze of frontlines and trenches and bombed-out streets. I was a bit hesitant to walk blindly into the fighting, but I soon discovered the fighting was all around me, and I found myself hunkered down inside the main hospital that MSF happened to be working at. The wounded were arriving in droves, casualties of the shelling, and I moved with the chaos in front of me: women screaming for their dead children, nearby bombs shattering the last glass windows. There was so much going on that at times it was difficult to photograph and my memory now is loud and red. I watched as doctors desperately tried to save a young baby, but too late. A young girl lay in the operating theatre bleeding out from severe shrapnel wounds, her legs like shredded sticks. Then dropping my cameras to help a surgeon, I began cutting off the shrapnel ridden rags from a man’s torso. The dead were all over the floors, and then there’s the one photograph I remember most, the photograph I decided not to take. It still haunts me today, and I am still conflicted over my choice. I saw a gurney and a child was underneath a sheet. I lifted the sheet and to my horror I saw no face except one eye. Momentarily turning around, I saw the child’s parents looking at me. I gently lay the sheet back over the body and felt shame and pity. I remember it being a kind of turning point.

After that, I returned quite often to cover stories in Afghanistan, sometimes on assignment and sometimes on spec. I could feel it in my blood. Like a panic attack. It had an infectious hold on me. I wanted more. It was the world’s forgotten story. But to be honest, the best photographs I ever took were the ones that I didn’t take, the ones I missed.

Tajik Refugees, Saki Camp, Mazar-i-Sharif, 1993

Tajik Wedding, Saki Camp, 1993

Orphanage, Kabul, 1995

Kabul, Gym, 1995

In 1998, I was on assignment for the French magazine Le Figaro shooting a profile story about the legendary Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud. Massoud’s Northern Alliance were in control of only 10% of Afghanistan; the Taliban controlled the rest. I was given such close access to him I could pretty much photograph everything he did. He had a mesmerizing and powerful presence, which made photographing him exciting. I was looking for the unguarded moment, the right light, composition and moment, and it all came together in an orchard outside the town of Faizabad in the north. Massoud and his friends had just finished prayers at sundown when something drew his gaze skyward. It seemed otherworldly, as though he was searching for some kind of spiritual message. Later I asked Massoud’s assistant why I was given such incredible access and he replied that Massoud told him that he liked me because I never asked him to pose or got in his way and that he didn’t really see me. I could not have imagined a better compliment.

“We will not be a pawn in someone else’s game, we will always be Afghanistan!” - Ahmed Shah Massoud

Ahmed Shah Massoud, Flying over Afghanistan, 1998

Whenever I travelled to Afghanistan I always tried to tell the human stories of Afghans and how they coped with life under constant threat. When I was covering the civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban in late 1998, I came across a soldier inside a bombed-out ruin along a frontline near Bagram airfield, just north of the capital. It was his shell-shocked gaze that struck me first, then I saw his prosthetic arms. I was compelled to make a rare (for me at that time) set-up portrait. He then told me his story, one that encapsulated the absurdity of war: “I was not a soldier before; I used to work for an international NGO de-mining company trying to rid the country of landmines. One day I was de-mining when one blew off my arms – a mine that had been planted by the Taliban. It was then that I decided to join up with the Northern Alliance and learned to shoot an AK-47 with my new arms so I could take my revenge”.

Ahmed Shah Massoud was assassinated two days before September 11, 2001. When the US-led War on Terror began I went back to Afghanistan for Time Magazine. I remember many things from that time, especially the weeks of waiting across the border to get into Afghanistan and then the epic journey out, much of which I didn’t photograph.

Commander Malak read my papers over cups of tea, handing me new letters and documents—my right of passage for the journey. Afghanistan doesn’t function without the delivery services of small scrunched-up pieces of paper, chits. These notes can cross great distances and are sometimes be the only form of communication. With my new “papers” I set about finding reliable guides. Language was a problem until I drew a horse and stick figure on a piece of scrap paper and moved it in the direction of Pakistan.

Climbing a narrow trail along the Tagab-i-Mongan River, we hug the cliff faces, the horses sure-footed, the riders grateful. Our shadows caress the natural walls, swaying with the rhythmic motion of the horses, creating a peaceful space, and I start to dream. The silence, broken only by the steady clip-clop of the horse’s hooves, sends me into a light hypnotic state, a meditation. We ride on, swallowed up into the belly of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Emerald green waters below us turn to black, as the moonlight becomes our guide.

I am led inside an ancient Silk Road teahouse. Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Star Wars, extraterrestrial and primitive. Low-lit oil lamps reveal leathered faces from another time, hard, brutal, strange and beautiful. A silence greets me that is as tangible as mud, eyes from within darkness and unfamiliar faces remain fixed on me. I am the alien, not them. From within, wafts of smoke, the acrid smells of cooking fats, the pungent and unpleasant sour stench of sweat from a thousand years, the familiar blanket of sheep’s piss on human skin, and the unmistakable sweet fragrance of hashish crowds my nasal passages.

After crossing the 5,000-metre Dorah Pass, my guides left me at the frontier to face the Pakistani border police. Shocked to see me, they informed me that I was entering illegally. The first and only thought that crossed my mind at that moment was to tell them that there were hundreds of other desperate foreign journalists behind me. It worked.

Wounded Afghan child, Gonbad Village, 2005

Taliban Burning, 2005

Bamian, 2005

Afghan soldiers, Kunar 2005

Weapons Search, Gonbad Village, 2005

In 2005, I was embedded with a US Army Psychological Operations Unit in Kandahar. AC/DC’s Hells Bells is blaring out of a loudspeaker above my head as I rumble out of Kandahar Air Force Base. I’m nervous, excited and crammed inside a Humvee. After six weeks of missions with American soldiers, the flak jacket and helmet I’m wearing are starting to feel very much a part of my body.

Music is playing as our convoy drives north, Johnny Cash, Rage Against The Machine, the theme to Star Wars, even Fleetwood Mac; it’s a soundtrack to war. My psych ops guide John says he plays the music because it pisses off the Taliban (they banned music when they were in power), and announces to the enemy, the Americans are coming! “It’s the only way we can find the Taliban,” John says, “if they attack us first then we can fight back.” Otherwise you just don’t see them. One marine described it perfectly to me. “It’s like chasing ghosts. These shadows pop out of caves and attack you, and then they drop their guns and run away.”

I’ve just woken up in a rocky dry riverbed. I arrived last night with Legion Company, the unit I’m embedded with. I’m eating MREs, looking out at a beautiful sunrise over rugged mountains and it looks like the moon. I’m digesting the drive up here and last night’s patrol inside the village. Yesterday another platoon ahead of us was ambushed a few hundred meters away. One American and one Afghan soldier were killed. Two insurgents were also killed in the battle.

I take a photograph of a young boy lying on the ground, caressed by an elderly man I assume is his father. Of course I am drawn to the sad tragedy of the scene, but it’s the shaft of light that crosses the child’s face perfectly. It feels almost biblical. The man says the Americans shot him. It’s impossible to know but they were both injured during yesterday’s fight. John and another medic attend the wounds and prepare them to be evacuated by U.S. helicopter back to Kandahar.

It was the same day that I made photographs of US soldiers burning the bodies of two dead Taliban that became international news and changed US military policy. But it’s the photo of this child that I think about more. Maybe because I’m a father too. It’s a sad reality that innocent children too often become the victims of these adult war games.

Three years later, in 2008, I had my own brush with death when the Taliban sent a child suicide bomber into a crowded area of mostly Afghan policemen about to venture out on a poppy eradication mission in Khogyani village, eastern Afghanistan. I was on assignment for Smithsonian. When the child blew himself up outside a police barracks, I was five metres from the blast. After blacking out, I found myself taking cover with Afghan police as a gun battle erupted around us. My writer friend and colleague Paul Raffaele who took the full force of the blast —thus shielding me as we sat inside a Ford Ranger pick up—received severe injuries but was also lucky to have survived.

Most people would see this as a clear warning sign to never step foot in such a place ever again. But although it took me a year, I went back. I had to. Maybe I needed to prove I could still take the risks. Or maybe I just wasn’t finished yet.

Of all the photographs I took in Afghanistan, one of my favourites is of a man in Kabul, one of many I photographed that day along a dusty and busy bus station. My good friend and colleague Jacques Menasche and I had spent weeks doing a story around heroin addiction and I think the feeling of seeing something with a sense of normality felt liberating. It was the first time I had made large format portraits like this in Afghanistan and the surprise element that evolved that afternoon inside that chaotic scene was truly astonishing. The initial controls I put on the subject and the crowds to stay away collapsed and led beautifully to the scenes of the audience that don’t know they are in the frame being captured along with the direct gaze and attention of the sitter. The surprise and mystery off each frame was priceless, and on top of that I was able to gift every subject a Polaroid.

Somehow the man’s solemn look and the various emotions from the crowd makes the photograph simultaneously timeless and present. Maybe he’s the face of all Afghans: proud, strong and confident — but worried.

Polaroid

Shamsatoo, Afghan refugee camp Peshawar, Pakistan, 2001

Kabul, 2006

Kabul Streets, 2006

Stephen Dupont is an Australian artist who specializes in photography, video, and print. Born in Sydney in 1967, he grew up in the western suburbs and Southern Highlands under harsh social conditions and displacement. His parents were full-time carers of state wards. Stephen primarily focuses on long-term personal projects, although he also works on documentaries and takes on selected magazine assignments. His work spans the editorial, art, and film worlds, and he is known for his poignant photography depicting the human condition, war, and climate.
He became interested in photography during his early travels as a teenager to remote and wild places, using photography as a way to document his experiences. When he visited the Magnum Agency exhibition "In Our Time" and saw the powerful photography, especially that of Salgado, he was inspired to become a documentary photographer.

He has received numerous awards, including the W. Eugene Smith Grant, Robert Gardner Fellowship from Harvard University, a Robert Capa Gold Medal Citation, the Olivier Rebbot, and several World Press Photo Awards. Stephen holds a Masters degree in Philosophy and is passionate about teaching workshops and giving public talks on photography, film, and his life. He has published seven unique and seventeen limited-edition art books. Several books, catalogues featuring his photography, and diaries have been published by Steidl, NYPL, Radius, PowerHouse, Yale, and Aperture.

As a self-taught photographer, Stephen considers documentary photographers such as Don McCullin, Josef Koudelka, Robert Frank, James Nactwey, and W. Eugene Smith as his teachers and inspirations. "By immersing myself in their books I saw a kind of vision and style that I would take on board, emulate and then refine into my own style of photography, which is a photojournalistic and documentary approach. Filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick and Terence Malik, many writers like Hemingway and Steinbeck and artists like Goya and Bacon all contributed to my development as a photographer and artist."

He embarked on his photography journey using analogue cameras, capturing images on film, and developing them in the darkroom. As time progressed, he observed the transformation of photography into the digital realm, which has now become the preferred medium for most photographers. Interestingly, he still finds joy in using film for black-and-white photography while employing digital cameras for colour work. The remarkable advancements in digital photography have made it challenging to overlook its benefits, particularly in low-light conditions and image resolution. He particularly appreciates the utility of digital image production for crafting layouts in his book designs and for high-quality printing.

In his camera bag, he carries both film and digital gear, including a Leica digital and film rangefinder body, 35mm and 50mm lenses, medium format film cameras, Polaroid cameras, film, memory cards, a torch, medical kit, Leica 28mm lens, extra Leica film bodies, a Minolta light meter, a zoom recorder for audio, a silk cloth for cleaning, batteries, a small pocket tripod, and a Leatherman multi-tool.

“I guess I am mainly with my family, my partner and daughter. My main physical activity is surfing which also acts as a great mind healer as well. I spend a lot of time editing through my archive or new works and designing new book and exhibition projects. I do lots of research mainly through reading books and watching films. Music is also big with me, I play vinyl as I am working in my studio, it gives me ideas and enjoyment. “

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