



1 / 15 Chevron Chevron Photographs by Larry Towell/Magnum, from "Afghanistan" (Aperture, 2014)

When Herman Melville’s Ishmael, in the opening chapter of “Moby-Dick,” tries to account for why he goes whaling, he gives credit, above all, to “the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago”—a bill of headlines that remains so timely as to suggest that “those stage managers, the Fates,” have a fairly limited repertoire:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.” “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.” “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.”

The Afghan bloodbath of Melville’s reference was a catastrophically misbegotten campaign of colonial conquest waged by the British East India Company against Afghan tribal fighters in the late eighteen-thirties and early eighteen-forties. The First Anglo-Afghan War, as it came to be known, marked the beginning of Afghanistan’s enduring reputation as a graveyard of empire—a legacy that has been endlessly reinforced, always at a cost more exacting to Afghans than to the invaders they resist. Afghanistan is now the scene of America’s longest foreign war, a grim and wasteful failure that has ground on for thirteen years with no real end in sight, even though President Obama has promised to withdraw most American forces before he withdraws from the White House.

So it’s fitting that the photographer Larry Towell begins his monumental new book, “Afghanistan,” more or less where Ishmael’s “programme of Providence” left off: the endpapers of the book feature an etching that depicts a massive clash of horsemen in the high mountain passes of the Hindu Kush during the First Anglo-Afghan War. It is an image from the pre-history of photography; hundreds, perhaps thousands, of helmeted and turbaned warriors hack at each other with swords from atop their rearing steeds, in a boiling tangle on a rocky, barren field with dead and dying men and horses strewn about—a picture you can almost hear and smell, but in the thick of which you cannot really see what exactly is going on. On the facing page of Towell’s frontispiece is a collage he made with a high-definition scanner, composed of artifacts from the British era in Afghanistan and predominated by the front page of the New York Weekly Herald from April 23, 1842, where, under the banner “VERY IMPORTANT,” the “total annihilation of the British Army in Afghanistan” was reported: “Six thousand of the Soldiers Slaughtered,” and so on. Flip the page, and there’s another collage, this time of Russian-era artifacts: rusty bullet casings, attack-helicopter playing cards, enamel hammer-and-sickle medals, and soldiers’ souvenir snapshots.

Towell, a Canadian, is one of the revered older masters at the photo agency Magnum, and he was in New York on September 11, 2001, for a meeting with colleagues when Al Qaeda struck. His own Afghan chronicle started that morning, at Ground Zero, with some apocalyptic images that he snapped as the Twin Towers collapsed. In an opening essay, he writes, “The day’s events scared me, but not as much as the sight of the most powerful head of state on earth declaring on TV, in the language of the Wild West, an open-ended war with no exit strategy against an enemy that had no state, no borders.” Towell did not follow that war to Afghanistan until much later—he worked there between 2008 and 2011—and, in the over-all picture of the place that he presents in his book, the American war of the Bush and Obama years often feels more like the backdrop than the climax of the Afghan ordeal.

The first sustained sequence of photographs shows ruins of Cold War-era Russian military posts and equipment. Page after page is given over to these mute and desolate scrap heaps of history. And when Towell turns to what he calls “the shell-shocked figures of this disfigured land,” it is at first the victims of land mines from the Soviet war and its aftermath that preoccupy him. He spent a great deal of time at a Red Cross prosthetics ward, watching the thoroughly maimed get partially repaired. Once again, there is a profound repetitiveness to the imagery of amputees and prostheses, an almost fetishistic insistence on making us examine every detail of the patients’ condition. There are pages that present prosthetic devices and land mines and even the various styles of hats the Russians wore as if in a mail-order catalogue. Towell also goes deeply and exhaustively into depicting a community of opium and heroin addicts who live in Kabul’s blasted wreckage, before beginning to bring the American presence into focus, with a series of pictures of forward-operating bases and outposts that look like the destroyed Soviet facilities come back to life. A series from embeds with medevac teams responding to firefight casualties feels like a continuation of his work on the prosthetics ward.

“Afghanistan” is itself an extraordinary object, a limited-edition coffee-table book—massive to the point of ungainliness—bound in heavy cloth and stamped with a map of the country, lusciously printed on heavy stock, weighing more than five pounds, and priced at a hundred and fifty dollars. As an artifact, it belongs to the world of high art or high fashion rather than to the lower depths that it depicts—all the more so because the book is designed, in a sort of scrapbook style, to look like a dummy for a book rather than the finished thing. The photographs appear to be attached to the pages with photo corners or with tape; on many pages, several pictures vie for attention, sometimes laid out contact-sheet style on a grid, sometimes in collage; scans of found artifacts are interspersed throughout; captions are hand written, occasionally jotted notebook style across the images themselves.

Although there are color photographs, Towell is a devotee of black-and-white film photography and a painstakingly artful printer. In creating the impression of a work in progress, he is anything but slapdash: he is showing us his process with a polish that few can compete with. The aim seems to be to create a cumulative effect through the book that is greater than the impact of the singular images—and there is no escaping the overwhelming sense of Afghanistan’s blight. As Towell writes in his introductory essay, “War is completely natural, which is what makes it so appalling.”

Yet the most powerful and long-lingering images in Towell’s tour of hell are those in which the war is entirely invisible. There are several spectacularly arresting photographs, for instance, of Afghan horsemen competing at Bushkazi, the national sport, in which rival teams of equestrians vie to take control of a decapitated goat carcass and heave it into a goal. These photographs burst with vitality and spirit, with a sense of pageantry and proud defiance, that is as exhilarating as the sense of devastation and victimhood that runs through the rest of the book is crushing.

The wild grandeur of these Bushkazi photos recalls some of the crazed frenzy of the equestrian-battle etching that Towell uses in the book’s endpapers. They serve as a potent reminder of the Afghanistan that perseveres, and even prevails, against the outsiders who have failed to tame it. In a much quieter register, a single panoramic photograph of a street scene in the old city of Kabul has the same effect: here are men and boys going about their life, on its own terms, in its place—a picture full of motion and emotion, but without violence or any evident suggestion of it.