Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

In good weather, Bala Murghab (Fort Chicken River) was several days' ride by four-wheel drive truck from the nearest paved road. These men have come from farms and villages to a weekly market. I usually felt quite safe in Afghanistan, and my slight physique worked to my advantage. The ancient obligation to protect a guest was still alive here, and what Afghan could live it down if it were known that he had attacked such a thin, pale stranger? Nonetheless, I did not wave my camera about carelessly, I worked with long lenses, and always withdrew at the first sign of displeasure. My roamings usually led me out across the countryside from dawn until sunset, and rarely did I go without offers of food and tea, especially tea, very sweet tea.

These men are Pushtuns living in separate communities in a traditionally Turkomen area in the North. Afghanistan was created by the British and the Russians to be a weak buffer state between their empires, and the Pushtun are the most powerful tribe. The Pushtun King Abdur Rahman forced a different branch of his Pushtun tribe to move to the North. In their old lands these cousins had been his enemies (the Pushtu words for enemy and cousin are virtually the same). Once in Afghan Turkistan, amid the Turkomen and Uzbeks - people with very different languages and tradtions, they became his allies, fellow Pushtuns.


Grain Market

Bala Murghab (Fort Chicken River), Afghanistan, April 1978, 35 mm Nikon, 200 mm Nikkor lens, Ektachrome 400 film, Dye transfer print 1984, �Luke Powell, 1996