Picturing Afghanistan

Qandahar, Afghanistan, has stood at the center of cultural convergence and conflict for over two millennia.

Situated at the intersection of ancient trade routes and surrounded by powerful Asian empires, it’s not surprising that walls nearly 30 feet thick and 30 feet high once framed the early modern city.

In 1881, toward the end of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, a British military doctor began taking photographs of Qandahar. His images, collected in what is known as the Qandahar Album, are some of the earliest photographic records of the city. Over 140 years later the album can be explored online for the first time.

The photographer, Dr. Benjamin Simpson, was a member of the British-Indian forces that controlled the city after defeating Ayub Khan, the governor of Herat, who attempted to rid Afghanistan of foreign intervention. Simpson’s intention was to document the region, key sites, and important players in the conflict.

At the Crossroads: Qandahar in Images and Empires, a new digital experience from the Getty Research Institute (GRI), includes dozens of these pictures, which feature important heritage sites, the architecture of the city, and its inhabitants, as well as explanatory text in English, Dari, and Pashto.

“These photographs reveal the intrusions of the British occupation of Qandahar and speak to the resilience of a city and people caught between preserving their traditions and way of life and the inextricable forces of colonization and globalization,” writes Aparna Kumar, lecturer in art and visual cultures of the Global South at University College London, in her essay about the photographs. “The album offers a crucial glimpse into the region’s past and endeavors to inspire further study on the history and culture of Afghanistan.”

Conflict and the Camera

In 1880, the Battle of Maiwand nearly sealed Afghan victory at Qandahar, as British-Indian forces fought to secure the area as a buffer zone between India and Russian-ruled territories. However, British reinforcements from Kabul quickly restored the city to control under British-Indian forces in the Battle of Qandahar.

Simpson photographed Qandahar against the backdrop of these defeats and victories. His images memorialize key sites of conflict, including the village of Deh-i-Khoja, the Baba Wali Pass, and Karez Hill. But the photographs served other purposes as well—for surveillance and military strategy, and as propaganda for the British at home, who could be simultaneously dazzled by the region’s beauty and supportive of its occupation.

“Simpson was no amateur photographer—his passion and knowledge of photographic chemistry may explain why he chose to transport hundreds of pounds of equipment to Qandahar when he was stationed there,” says Frances Terpak, senior curator at the Getty Research Institute. “He had a point of view when he created the album and wanted to tell a visual story of the conflict in a way that a British veteran might recount it, no matter how one-sided the recollection.”

Seen and Unseen

The spectacular architecture and urban design of Qandahar are present in nearly every photograph in the album, even when they do not take center stage. Founded by Ahmad Shah Durrani (r. 1747–72) in 1761, Qandahar was laid out like other contemporary urban centers in the early modern Persianate world, with neighborhoods organized by their inhabitants’ ethnicities, tribal identifications, and occupations.

At the city’s bustling bazaars, Herati merchants sold Iranian carpets and silks, nomads bartered hides and metalwork, and Hindus from Sindh/Shikarpur offered banking services. Indicative of the city’s importance as a commercial axis, its monumental gates were named after and faced the cities of Herat, Kabul, and Shikarpur, which formed the next link in a series of routes, radiating out and back, where goods and ideas abundantly flowed.

“The southern region of Afghanistan—often depicted in modern cultural visual products and writings as dusty desert-like society in need of development—has several layers of rich urban and cultural histories that go back millennia,” says Dr. Jawan Shir Rasikh, an independent scholar specializing in second millennium South and Central Asia with a focus on Afghanistan.

“The architectural ruins, sites, and diverse archaeological and textual materials that we have at our disposal from the Bronze Age society of Mundigak in Qandahar, the Achaemenid ancient city of Zaranj in Nimroz, and the medieval Ghaznavid and Ghurid palaces, forts, minarets, bazaars, caravansaries, and irrigation canals of Zamindawar region in Ghazni, Zabul and Helmand are testimony to a deep and unknown past of this region. Simpson’s images in the Qandahar Album provide a valuable opportunity to get a concrete visual sense about 19th-century social and spatial landscapes of one of the region’s main urban centers.”

Simpson also managed to photograph some of the local ethnic groups, including Hazaras, Parsiwans, and Timuris. While not a full documentation of the city’s diversity, since 15,000 of its residents had been expunged by British troops, these are some of the few known photographs of these communities from the 19th century.

“Although most of Afghanistan’s historical heritage was destroyed or disappeared during the recent decades, the Qandahar Album not only gives the Afghan a sense of continuity about their history but also fills the gap in understanding one of the most crucial periods of Afghanistan’s emergence as a nation-state,” says Dr. Omar Sharifi, country director of the American Institute of Afghanistan Studies.

While some photographs reflect Qandahar’s people and society, others are notable for the places, cultures, and context they exclude.

One example is Chilzina, an ancient chamber and staircase carved into a mountain peak just outside the city. The chamber contains rare etchings in Persian that tell the history of the conquests of Babur, first emperor of the Mughal Empire. However, Simpson did not photograph any details of the site even though it was easily accessible, only including its cliffside in a larger panoramic photograph.

The same fate befell the Qaitul Buddhist complex, a series of structures that date at least to the eighth century, a time in which Buddhism flourished in the region before being supplanted by Islam. While the British used it as a convenient landmark for military surveys at Qandahar, it was left out of the album entirely. It wouldn’t be until the mid-20th century that historians truly understood the complex’s importance, explaining, perhaps, its omission.

“Two decades before Simpson took his photographs, his fellow Indian Army officer, Alexander Cunningham, began searching for Buddhist ruins as director of the Archaeological Survey of India. Key to Cunningham’s efforts were the rock-carved edicts of the ancient Buddhist emperor Asoka, at least one of which (at Lauriya Nandangarh) Simpson himself photographed for the survey,” says Nile Green, professor and Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“It would not be until 1958 that the most extraordinary of all Asokan inscriptions was discovered—and this time not in India, but in Qandahar. In testament to the city’s role as a Eurasian crossroad, this bilingual text of an Indian Buddhist ruler was written in Greek and Aramaic, linguistic legacies of Afghanistan’s Hellenistic and Achaemenian eras. It was found at the Chilzina, which Simpson had only photographed from afar, leaving the edict as unnoticed as a speck of dust on his camera lens.”

Historical Echoes