History comes full circle for a new exhibition of Afghanistan war photographs, as TAMZIN LEWIS writes
POLITICIANS stand accused of failing to peruse their history books before waging war in Afghanistan, but photographer Simon Norfolk certainly paid due diligence before beginning his latest project.
Simon, who had documented Afghanistan in 2001, came across the first ever photographs to be taken in Afghanistan.
They were the work of John Burke (1843-1900), an Irishman who went to India as an apothecary with the Royal Engineers and later became assistant to photographer William Baker.
When the Second Anglo-Afghan War broke out, Burke tried to get taken on as an official British Army photographer but was turned down.
He went anyway, financing his travel by selling photos of English soldiers and Indian people.
Because newspapers couldn’t print photographs in the 1870s, Burke’s photos were passed to engravers who turned them into illustrations.
It was for this market that Burke took the first photographs of Afghanistan in 1879.
His eloquent glass plate images form an extraordinary record of the Second Anglo-Afghan War which lasted from 1878 -80.
Inspired by Burke’s humane images, which demonstrate a critical eye for imperialism, Simon Norfolk travelled to Afghanistan in 2010 to follow in his footsteps.
Simon, who lives in Brighton, says: “When Brian Liddy, a curator at the National Media Museum in Bradford, first showed me one of the Burke albums, I immediately saw a cycle of imperial history right there.
“Today’s war should more properly called the Fourth Anglo-Afghan War.”
Simon has spent the past 10 years photographing war zones and refugee crises.
In what he terms a collaboration with his Victorian forerunner, Simon engaged in a kind of re-photography, returning to the exact locations of John Burke’s photos.
Simon took pictures of battlefields, archaeological sites and street scenes in addition to portraits of British officers and ethnological group portraits of Afghan people.
But rather than artificially re-staging these compositions, Simon identified contemporary equivalents, as in the images featured here.
He says: “I felt I needed to go to Afghanistan to walk in his shoes as it were; to ask, ‘What would John Burke photograph today?’
“I’m presenting the work as an artistic partnership in the fullest sense of the term, except that he is dead.”
Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan by John Burke and Simon Norfolk is at Side Gallery, 9 Side, Newcastle, until February 4. The gallery is open Tuesdays to Saturdays, 11am-5pm, and admission is free. It’s closed on bank holidays. Check www.amber-online.com