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Welcome to Luke Powell Photographs
It is important for those living in the industrial world to develop an appreciation for cultures that are sustainable, to learn to see beauty and survival in a world where people walk, live in daily contact with animals, raise their own food, pray, and live in families. Such people have as much to teach us as we have to teach them.
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On-Line
Exhibitions:
Afghanistan, 1970s The Afghan Folio (32) Herat (33) Kandahar (30) The Dog Fights (9) Kabul (25) Maimana (64) Afghanistan, 2000 Taliban Afghanistan (76) Badakshan and the Panjsheer (63) Afghanistan, 2001-2 Refugee Camps at Chaman (30) Bamiyan (70) Mazar (55) Olak (9) Returning IDPs (8) Afghanistan, 2003 Pul-i-Kumri, Quail Fights (44) Kunduz (25) Khanabad (12) Taliqan (15) Faizabad (24) Dara-i-Suf (9) Sholgara (13) Balkh (39) Faryab (56) Afghan Schools, 2003 (88) Return to Bamiyan (56) Folari (14) Band-i-Amir (35) Chaghcheran (73) Adrascan (52) Farah (14) Return to Herat (65) Around Herat (30) Ghazni (14) Jalalabad (20) Return to Kabul (60) Returning Afghans (32) The previous chapters are photo essays. Italics indicates more raw information, less art, stories or groups of photographs on a similar themes mounted so that people who need pictures on that subject can easily find what they need. Some pictures are repeated from the earlier photo essays. Demining 2000 (72) Government Transition, 2001 (26) UXO BLUes, 2001 (47) Trips to the Grave of Masood (16) Women in Afghanistan Emma in Afghanistan (7) International Women's Day (22) Wearing Burkas (26) Refugees (32) Internally Displaced Persons - IDPs (16) Girls and Young Women (46) School (25) Bakery (25) Pakistan (new, more chapters coming soon) Peshawar (19) The Vale of Swat (44) Landscapes Exhibition The Hills of Palestine (8 or 104) Islands in the Nile (8) Ceylon, In the Clouds (8) The Way to Zanscar (8) Vermont (18) Essays by Luke Powell The Mummy Canadian Sacrifices Other Information Museum Exhibit Schedule Technical Notes Links to Other Internet Sites |
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 Once you go to any chapter, to any page beyond this one, you are on a server at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and all of the web site there is a public service with no commercial content or links to commercial pages. I do sell prints, dye transfer prints of images from the 1970s and now inkjet prints of most other images on the web site. This is the only link to the sales pages that are on a private server: SALES This site is now hosted by the University of Nebraska at Omaha. They have the world's largest library on Afghanistan and are a major academic resource on Central Asia. Students and teachers may use these pictures for school reports or presentations without prior approval, but it is nice to hear from you. Larger scans of these images are available. Commercial use will be considered on a case by case basis. When writing to me seeking image files, please cut and paste the entire urls onto your wish. For the last several years I have been generous with my images of Afghanistan, allowing most aid groups to use them. I have intentionally muted my criticism and political reflections, because I wanted to get a book out. I thought that those who approve of these American wars and those who oppose them, both sides would like to learn more about Afghanistan. However, for thirty years I have been trying to publish a book of beautiful photographs of Afghanistan, and always the project is killed by powers beyond my control for political reasons. No American publisher will consider anything so controversial as a book so accepting of Afghan culture. But, different ethnic an political factors drive American art museums. When the Russians were the occupation army trying to drag the Afghans reluctantly into our industry-dependent world, my exhibit The Afghan Folio had over a dozen shows a year in museums across North America. There were over a million visitors in 1989 alone at twenty-two different museums. Now these exhibitions have stopped. Amazing how quickly American taste in art changes. If I cannot get my beautiful book out before the public, with its politically neutral text, then I may as well make known a little more clearly what I have seen and be more restrictive in how my pictures are used by the aid industry. During my entire career I have remained resolutely neutral in the politics of Afghanistan. In 2000 the Taliban and the Northern Alliance welcomed me back and allowed me to travel widely in their areas of control, and the US government paid my ticket back to Asia if I would bring a crated exhibition with me. I had always been relentlessly neutral in Afghan politics, so everyone trusted me. Now that the Americans have clearly taken sides in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, my position becomes more awkward. Off and on through 2003 I stayed on in Afghanistan under contract with various UN agencies, but most of the time I was out alone in the countryside. By the end of 2003, however, I had begun to feel like part of the occupation; I could sense it in the attitude of the people. I would not have served with Hitler in Poland or with Mussoloni in Ethiopia, and I do not wish to be seen by the Afghans as a part of any foreign occupation, so I left and have not been back. Bringing prostitutes into Afghanistan, permitting the opening of bars and whore houses in Shar-e Nau, at a time when AIDS is stalking Asia, is a war crime. Even if we have seen this done so many times before by American forces in other countries, it is such an explicit rejection of Afghan culture that the horror of it should be more obvious there. I have a friend who works with AIDS orphans in Cambodia. The negative effects of these American invasions lasts for generations. The UN too has been intentionally destroying Afghan culture and is complicit with the American occupation. The UN people who had the most experience were all fired during the first year of the occupation, or they left in disgust, as a small circle of sympathetic and knowledgeable experts was replaced by an avalanche of young bureaucrats with no knowledge of Afghanistan whatever and little inclination to learn. When I took short term contracts with the UN I was often required to shave my beard off, and they preferred that I not wear local clothing. I was surprised to find that my friends Mervin Patterson and Michael Semple had been back in Afghanistan again with the UN and the EU, until Karzai threw them out in early 2008, amid considerable publicity, for opening lines of communication with the Taliban. Someone with the UN was reported by the BBC as saying that the UN lost half its expertise when they left. Everyone who knew Afghanistan well understood from the beginning that the Pashtun would eventually resist this latest occupation. Many of us said so, and those who did were driven out by the bureaucrats. I moved to Canada as soon as I returned to the US, and now I wait. When the Afghans have driven out the latest round of Western adventurers who have come to try to prove their manhood against the fabled Afghans, I would like to still have the respect of the Afghans and not be associated with the American invasion forces, their puppet government, or their war crimes. There is a fine line between serving needy people and being a civilian worker with occupation that is attempting to change the culture of anther coungry. So, I no longer will look with constant approval on most aid groups who want to use my photographs. I will consider them more carefully on a case by case basis. Only the deminers, MSF, and the ICRC have permission to use anything any time and my encouragement to ask for larger files when needed. Over the decades I have taken sufficient photographs to make a separate book on many subjects, and in most cases I have printed only a small fraction of the best images, if that. I photographed Palestine before it was destroyed, walking all over the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the winter and spring of1979-80, and I spent three months twice shooting in Egypt. I have work on Chitral, Gilgit, Swat, Gojal, Hunza, Ladakh and Zanscar, Rajasthan, Mandu, Hampi, Bijapur, Pushkar, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala. I shot once for three months all over Ceylon. I shot for deminers in Mozambique. I have been working on Paris in Winter for many years, and I spent a summer once shooting in Finistere. One spring I shot in Provence, another spring around Bayonne and Biaritz. Not many years ago I spent two long fall seasons shooting landscapes all across the American West, expecially in the national parks. One year I shot in every county in Vermont in every season. Of all the photographers I know who have worked extensively with a camera in unindustrialized countries, I am the only one who ever made his own dye transfer prints. Of all the high-end color printers I know, I have spent the most time shooting subjects that have historical relevance, as opposed to abstractions or swamp grass or sunsets. It is rare to be both a shooter and a printer. I have many more photographs than I will ever have time to clean and print. Even if I am not considered a significant artist by future generations, my photographs illustrate subjects that people from those lands will one day want to see. Now I look for a place where my work will be appreciated and survive. I do not believe that any nation can survive for long under the shadow of a lie as great as that of 11 September 2001. The lessons of Vietnam were not learned, and in those years and the decades that followed, good people less often chose government service. I have a first cousin who is in the CIA, and the last time we met he cussed me out in front of other people and at great length for shaming my family by associating with "rag heads and sand niggers." This is the kind of person in my generation who went into government. It is my firm belief that America, which has set itself up as one grand morality play for the world's entertainment, is now about to go in for a round of extraordinary self destruction. My advice to intelligent and well-meaning young Americans is to leave. At this point in my life I am looking for an institution or a country that will offer me a place to live and work and interested friends to preserve my work when I am gone. I am sixty-one years old, so this has become a concern. America has only become more violent and vulgar over the years, and hostility toward Islam has been intentionally cultivated there for financial, political, religious, and ethnocentric reasons. Many times in my life I have spent time in Paris, and I began moving to Paris two years ago. Since France has a huge Muslim population and a long history of support for political exiles, I expected France to oppose the Americans by becoming a defender of Islam in the face of American nonsense, but much to my horror, France has for now jumped on the American bigotry bandwagon. French editors who once were always open to my work no longer speak to me. So many countries have joined in the American gang-rape of Afghanistan that I hardly know where to turn. I am actively seeking a new country in which to live and a museum or a university that appreciates what I have tried to do. Please let me know if you have suggestions. I will come with all of my crated exhibits and slides, scans and prints if you will help me to preserve and present my work for future generations. As a bonus you will get my wife too, and she is one of the sweetest and most patient people on this good earth. |
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