The Qandahar Album contains 72 prints taken by British army surgeon and photographer Benjamin Simpson near the end of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–81). Simpson, a member of the British-Indian forces that controlled Qandahar, intended to document the region and key players in the conflict. Though created within the framework of imperialism, the album—which includes landscapes, portraits, and images of architectural ruins—provides an essential record of a city that has stood at the center of the region’s cultural convergences and conflicts for over two millennia.

Central to this project was a planned series of exhibitions to be held across Afghanistan in 2022, in which approximately 55 reproductions from the Qandahar Album were to be featured with accompanying texts in Dari, English, and Pashto. However, the pullout of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, followed by the Taliban’s swift retaking of the country, postponed this effort. The exhibitions would have provided a groundbreaking opportunity to publicly display and discuss the Qandahar Album in Afghanistan, and the curators remain hopeful that this will still happen.