The photographer Simon Norfolk came to MMU yesterday to talk about his recent project in Afghanistan in which he attempted to follow in the footsteps of another photographer John Burke who was in and around Kabul in 1880. The idea is to explore the current moment of British imperial involvement in Afghanistan in relation to a similar moment from the past. Take a look at the project on Simon’s website. The photographs under the ‘city’ section seem to me to be the most interesting for they present to things we do not usually see about Afghanistan – not just the war destruction of the city, but commercial developments and the investment of capital into the urban infrastructure. These developments appear to be following the usual tendencies of what Mike Davis calls ‘the planet of slums’, where urban space in the Third World is radically divided between the shanty dwellers and the those living in securitized communities.
Simon
