Simon Norfolk’s 2002 book Afghanistan: chronotopia is now recognised as a classic of photography. It established Norfolk’s reputation as one of the leading photographers in the world and has been exhibited at more than thirty venues worldwide.

In 2010 Simon Norfolk returned to Afghanistan. This time he followed in the footsteps of the nineteenth century Irish photographer John Burke, a superb, yet virtually unknown, war photographer. Burke’s eloquent and beautiful photographs of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) provide an extraordinary record. Using unwieldy wet-plate collodion negatives and huge wooden cameras he shot landscapes, battle-fields, archaeological sites, street scenes, portraits of British officers and ethnological group portraits of Afghans in what amounts to a richly detailed record of an Imperial encounter. The range is tremendously broad, yet suffused with a delicate humanism. These are also the first ever pictures made in Afghanistan. With this book, one hundred and thirty years too late, John Burke’s time has come at last.

Norfolk’s new work looks at what happens when you add half a trillion US war dollars to an impoverished and broken country such as Afghanistan. Very loosely re-photographic in nature, the work is presented as an artistic collaboration between Burke and Norfolk. It features photographs by Burke never before published as well as Norfolk’s new pictures from Kabul and Helmand.

Simon Norfolk has received innumerable awards for his work including The European Publishers Award for Photography, The Olivier Rebbot Award (Foreign Press Club of America), and The Infinity Award (ICP, New York). His work is in major public and private collections throughout the world. His most recent exhibition, in March 2011, was shown at the Queen’s Palace in the Bagh-e Babur garden in Kabul. Supported by The World Collections Programme and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, it incorporated both Norfolk and Burke’s photographs alongside work resulting from a series of workshops by Simon Norfolk with Afghan photographers.

ON EXHIBITION
AT MICHAEL HOPPEN CONTEMPORARY
FROM MAY 13TH TO JUNE 16TH
more info

A haunting and beautiful limited edition book from the internationally respected photographer, Simon Norfolk.

This is a very special publication. Published as a slip-cased hardback, the page size is a massive 400mm x 320mm. It is printed on extra weight 200gsm paper, and incorporates matt and gloss varnishes. It includes 24 colour plates.

The war in Bosnia in the 1990s raised to common currency the terms ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’. It brought back to Europe a barbarism not seen since the Second World War; and was the first war fought very much under the eyes of the media. It was also the first conflict fought by killers who knew, even before the war had finished, that a war crimes tribunal awaited them.

Norfolk’s photographs initially appear almost abstract. Yet through these still and beautiful images of ice, water, snow and the land, we can sense the arrogance of killers who believed they could conceal the brutal evidence of their crimes by reburying their victims in ‘secondary' graves. But over time secrets escape, and the truth bleeds out.

Winner of the 2002 European Publishers’ Award for Photography, Simon Norfolk won the Olivier Rebbot Award (Foreign Press Association of America) in 2003 and was shortlisted for the CitiBank Prize. In 2004 he received a prestigious International Centre of Photography Infinity Award, and the Terence Donovan Award from the Royal Photographic Society. Already in 2005 he has received the Association of Photographers’Bursary Award, and been nominated for the Arles Outreach Award.

The Collectors Edition

In addition to the slipcased edition of bleed, this includes a signed print which is encased in a block of plexiglass. The details are as follows:

Image block
• Digital c-type print encased in acrylic, 50mm thick
• Image size 330mm x 264mm.
• Each print is signed and numbered on the reverse.
• Edition of 50.

The set is packed in a black craftboard box, with foam insets to support the image block.
Total weight 8Kgs.

The current price is £650, €1,000, $1,250 but please be aware that this will be subjct to increase as the edition continues to sell. To reserve a copy please contact us by email.

AFGHANISTAN: CHRONOTOPIA
SIMON NORFOLK

‘Afghanistan is unlike Sarajevo or Kigali or any other war-ravaged landscape I have ever photographed. In Kabul in particular, the devastation has a bizarre layering; the different destructive eras lying on top of each other. I was reminded of the story of Schliemann’s discovery of the remains of the classical city of Troy in the 1870s; digging down, he found nine cities layered upon each other, each one in its turn rebuilt and destroyed. Walking a Kabul street can be like walking through a Museum of the Archaeology of War – different moments of destruction lie like sediment on top of each other. There are places near Bagram Air Base or on the Shomali Plain where the front line has passed back and forth eight or nine times – each leaving a deadly flotsam of destroyed homes and fields seeded with landmines.

The landscapes of Afghanistan are the scenes that I knew first from the ‘Illustrated Children’s Bible’ given to me by my parents when I was a child. When David battled Goliath, these mountains and deserts were behind them. When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, these fauna and flora were over his shoulders. More accurately, these landscapes are how my childish imagination pictured the Apocalypse or Armageddon; utter destruction on a massive, Babylonian scale bathed in the crystal light of a desert sunrise.’ – Simon Norfolk

NOW OUT OF PRINT. WE CURRENTLY HAVE A SMALL NUMBER OF COPIES WHICH ARE PRICED AT £150.00 PLUS POSTAGE & PACKING. PLEASE EMAIL US TO CHECK AVAILABILITY.

`96 pages, 47 colour plates
320mm x 285mm
ISBN: 1-899235-54-X


Winner of the
European Publishers Award
for Photography 2002