Bibin: Shooting Kabul - Afghanistan (2002)

Location: Africa and the Middle East, Afghanistan

Keywords:

Project Background

Bibin: Photography by street-working children
Kabul, Afghanistan, 2002
Partner: Aschiana

Each day, over 37,000 children go out to work and beg on the streets of Kabul, almost a quarter of them young girls. Many of these children are the primary breadwinners for families who have been stripped of their homes, jobs or health over the course decades of fighting in Afghanistan.

In late 2002, 14 Afghan girls between the ages of 10 and 14 took to the streets of the capital city, for once not to scavenge and hawk. Armed with automatic cameras they framed photographs to convey to the wider world their attitudes to complex issues: views on peace and reconstruction, women and working children’s rights.

The photography workshops were themselves a political act: in a country just emerging from the long shadow of Taliban rule, the girls’ had previously been denied any formal education.

And what they captured on film bears little resemblance to the stark images wired back for news networks’ and foreign pages’ coverage of the aftermath of the American-led intervention in the country.

Instead, we get some idea, steeped with subjectivity and intimacy, of the extraordinary nature of these girls’ everyday.