Aryana is just a beginning.
A journey in Afghanistan, watching, listening, trying to understand.
What I show here is only the first layer.
I’ll return, to go deeper, and keep building this story.
Bamiyan. In front of the cliff, where the Buddha once stood. She walked by quick, alert, full of life. I asked, she stopped. Just for a second. A brief moment, caught between stone and light. It was Muharram. The streets echoed with chants and devotion. Bamiyan is sacred. Ancient, but alive. It’s the heart of the Hazara people, Shia, proud, resilient.
His name is Elias. I met him in the Valley of the Dragon, near Bamiyan. Legend says a dragon once lived here, casting fear across the mountains. Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, came and struck it down. With a single blow, he split the rocks and defeated the beast. From the wound in the land, a spring emerged, not blood, but the dragon’s tears. And they still flow today. Elias stood near that sacred place. But he wasn’t just there. He carried it.
The little girl and the soda. I met her at the edge of the Wakhan corridor, in Badakhshan province, sitting quietly in front of her family’s small shop, a bottle of soda in hand. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven, but there was something striking in her eyes, calm, curious, almost timeless. Life flows slowly here, in a rhythm far from the rest of the world. Moments like this remind me why I keep coming back.
From Kabul to Fayzabad, from Jalalabad to Mazar-i-Sharif, up to the remote heights of Nuristan and the far edges of the Afghan Pamir, I traveled across the north of the country alongside my contacts, faces who have become friends. I met dozens of people and heard stories both powerful and painful. Stories of war, survival, tradition, but also of joy, peace, and striking silences. Some gazes are now etched into me. There’s one question that runs through all my work: the existence of women. Not just their condition, but their visibility, their erasure, their absence. Or on the contrary: their ways of existing, resisting, passing things on. This journey didn’t start that obsession. It simply made it sharper. More urgent.
Kunduz, somewhere between Badakhshan and Kabul. A quick stop. A small town, windy and dusty. I saw him on a street corner. Silent, concentrated, his hands full of adult work. He wasn’t old enough, but he already had the role. Here, many children grow up against the clock.
A glimpse of daily life in Kunduz, northern Afghanistan. It’s afternoon, over 30°C. The river becomes a refuge, a playground, a place to cool down. Kids rush in, just like they do anywhere in the world when there’s water and heat. They shout, laugh, dive, invent games with almost nothing. A few men join in too, quietly, often half-dressed, just enough to dip in and breathe. It’s a universal image. A moment that crosses borders. Then comes a rumble in front of me. An old truck starts up, releasing a thick cloud of black smoke. It drives off down a dusty road, headed who knows where : a worksite, a village, the middle of nowhere. Life rolls on, between two swims.
