The British photographer Simon Norfolk first travelled to Afghanistan in 2001, soon after the 9/11 attacks. Although he didn’t know it at the time, he was around the same age as the nineteenth-century Irish photographer John Burke when Burke travelled to Afghanistan, in the late eighteen-seventies, to photograph the second Anglo-Afghan war. Last October, Norfolk returned, this time to make a new series of photographs inspired Burke’s work. Like Burke, Norfolk used a 4x5 camera, and he found echoes of the imperial conflict Burke witnessed over a century ago throughout Afghanistan’s contemporary landscape.
The two photographers’ work first appeared together this spring at London’s Tate Modern, which also produced a video about the posthumous collaboration, and Dewi Lewis published a book this year. Here’s a selection of Norfolk’s work, an exhibition of which opens this Thursday at Bonni Benrubi Gallery.
All images © Simon Norfolk/courtesy, Bonni Benrubi Gallery, NYC.
