A “journalistic one-man band” was how Harrison E. Salisbury, a giant of New York Times history, was described by his colleague Turner Catledge. “He can report, he can write, he can edit, he can see story ideas, he can direct others.”

And — though Mr. Catledge didn’t say so — he could sure take good pictures.

Who knew?

Mr. Salisbury’s evocative and smartly composed photos, taken in and around Kabul in 1961, were among the surprising images that greeted Darcy Eveleigh, a Times photo editor, as she peered into old file cabinets in the photo archive to find illustrations for Elisabeth Bumiller’s article on Afghanistan before 1978 in the Week in Review.

“When I opened up the folders, I was floored,” she said. In contact sheet after contact sheet, print after print, Afghanistan’s golden era of stability had been recorded for The Times by staff members better known for their bylines as correspondents: A. M. Rosenthal, Ralph Blumenthal and William Borders among them.

Myths begin pretty easily in a business where no memory lasts much longer than 24 hours. One myth in current circulation is that journalists are only now — For The Very First Time — becoming multimedia chroniclers, adept not only at telling but showing.

In fact, foreign correspondents have been taking their own pictures for decades.

“We all carried cameras, because wherever you were was interesting and you never knew when a good picture would come up,” recalled Mr. Blumenthal, 67, who is still reporting (and taking pictures) for The Times. He was always interested in photography. He’d graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and was an art major at City College before switching to English. His tool of choice was a Nikomat single-lens reflex 35-millimeter camera.

Mr. Borders, now 70, knew a little trade secret. “The story gets better display if it has pictures and I’d often be in places where there were no other pictures,” he said. “It was just to dress up a story. I always viewed myself as a reporter, not a photographer.”

He said that the photos didn’t help with his reporting, since he wouldn’t see them unless and until they were published. The most common way of transmitting photographs overseas was to send the canister of exposed film back to New York for developing and printing.

Mr. Blumenthal said he would always be on the lookout for anyone who was amenable to carrying the film back to the United States in person. Otherwise, he said, “You basically used carrier pigeons to get things out.”

For Mr. Borders, who was stationed in India, travels to Afghanistan were a somewhat routine event in the late 1970s — not that a trip to a place where people play an organized sport with animal carcasses can really be called routine.

“I don’t know why I felt so free to take pictures in a place like Kabul, which is so Islamic,” Mr. Borders said. “But I did. It was an independent, swaggering place. The Afghans never took any guff from anybody.” (He substituted the word “guff” at our request so that we could quote him.)

“Nobody has ever subdued it,” Mr. Borders said. “Even now.”

Among his most telling pictures is one of women in Western-style dress in Kabul, accompanying an article published Dec. 4, 1977, under the headline, “Afghan Women Begin to Break Free From Subservience.” (Slide 14.) Such a scene contrasted with the more customary experience of encountering women hidden within their chadors. “It is possible to walk for an hour through crowded streets in the old part of this mountain capital without seeing a single female face,” Mr. Borders wrote.

For Mr. Blumenthal, who was stationed in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, Afghanistan was a welcome respite — almost the polar opposite of conditions today. “It was one of the most picturesque places I’d ever been to on the planet,” he said. “It was like stepping back to the days of Richard Burton.” (Not that Richard Burton; this Richard Burton.)

He remembered workmen tooling beautiful knives by hand on street corners. “That’s the culture there,” he said. “They were armorers. These people — as we now know to our dismay — make wonderful weapons. And they know how to use them.”

One of Mr. Blumenthal’s most memorable pictures was taken in December 1970 on the floor of a sheepskin coat factory. (Slide 8.) In it, a young man gazes piercingly at the camera, momentarily suspending the fourth wall between a Kabul workshop and a reader almost 7,000 miles away.

We sent a couple of Mr. Blumenthal’s pictures to him as JPEG files to see if he might recall the circumstances. “I can’t say they stir a flood of recollections 39 years later,” he replied, “but I take an immodest pleasure in viewing the factory shot.”

Perhaps he couldn’t recall them because he’d never seen them before. His article, “An Afghan Success: Coats,” ran Jan. 18, 1971, on page 58. Without photographs.