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Photo Book Reviews

Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul (Design Method) by Ron Haviv, Essays by Illana Ozernoy Reviewed by Michael Jack Pazdon Article rating: 2.00

When the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11th, 2001, it was clear to several of the world's leading journalists and photojournalists that Afghanistan was a likely target for American retaliation. Planes tickets, supplies and strategies were procured with great haste, and the journalists started to gather in locations along the Afghan border, waiting to document what was to come.

Among them was Ron Haviv, a member of the cooperatively run photojournalism agency, VII, and veteran of the struggle to document many of recent history's major conflicts. After photographing some of the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks in New Yor! k, Haviv set off for a long journey through Afghanistan, on the road to Kabul, along with writer Ilana Ozernoy. Haviv's images of that journey have been collected along with essays by Ozernoy in a new book put out by de.MO called "Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul."

The book tells the story of Northern Alliance soldiers fighting their way to the center of Taliban power. Many of these men, having been born into the war that had ravaged their country for decades, had known nothing else. Displaying attitudes that are hard to imagine, they treat exchanges of fire, whizzing bullets, with the nonchalance of any other daily occurrence. For them, death is but another mundane fact of life and many fully expect to meet it before seeing an end to the conflict.

This is not an easy story to tell, and in the telling, the book offers us a lesson in the versatility of the photojournalistic image. We all know of images that stand alone to define an event or era.! These are the memorable images that seem to call forth from the page s of magazines to silence the noise and clutter that surround them. While these images are important, they run the risk of making too final a statement, of fixing events to the finality of fact and robbing them of their lived and emotional essence.

This is what really distinguishes the work that Haviv has included here. While each image could stand on its own, when included together they take off in a fluid and dream-like procession, allowing the viewer to loose their own imagination to a subtle but powerful story that unfolds gradually, page after page. This is indeed the mark of truly great storytelling, be it literary or visual--the ability to call the reader or viewer forth into a narrative that is suggestive and unclosed, requiring imaginative participation with what is being told and allowing the story to reflexively access the inner workings of the mind and to sink into the fabric of daily life.

Haviv's images achieve this, in part, thanks to a sens! e of abstraction and an attention to composition. Images of flight school brochures and plans for bombs are arranged within the frame to represent not only evidence, but also a still life representing frantic and curious activity. A woman kneeling by the side of the road becomes a blue form in a beige landscape, echoing the background blue of the sky. Indeed, the dominance of the colors blue and beige is, for all intents and purposes, one of the most striking themes of the book, making the instances when this color scheme is broken--red blood running down the chin of a dying man, the formerly-contraband multi-colored picture postcards of Bollywood starlets, a cluster of bright balloons carried by a man in Kabul--all the more striking.

The true colors and sharp imagery is also impressive considering that this was Haviv's first experience working entirely in digital. Due to the remoteness of the terrain, photographers could only get their work out to the Western pu! blic via computers and satellite phones. Thus, Afghanistan was photog raphy's first all-digital war, a fact that is conceptually interesting considering that, aside from the ubiquitous presence of the instruments of modern warfare, the landscape, clothes and dwellings of the regions the photographers were working in seems to have changed little since Medieval times.

Throughout the book we are treated to brief accounts of the journey composed by Haviv's companion, Ozernoy. The text goes well with the photographs, complimenting them but allowing them to tell their own story without the burden of over-explanation. All together, this makes for a very moving experience and a great tool for coming to understand the events and lives of a region so different from our own.

>>Click here to purchase Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul from Amazon.com...

>>Click here to visit Design Method of Operation's website..

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