In December of 2001, Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak visited Kandahar, Afghanistan, the city that had been the center of the Taliban regime. When the Taliban were in power, from 1996 until 2001, their strict interpretation of Islam forbade all visual representation of humans and of mammals.

Even street signs showing donkeys had their heads painted out. Portrait photography was a forbidden practice, yet a few photography studios did remain in Kandahar, because the Taliban needed images for identification, passports, and other documents (Dworzak).

After the fall of the Taliban, Thomas Dworzak discovered that some of these photography studios had been making clandestine portraits of Taliban soldiers, at the soldiers’ request. These images were taken behind closed doors, primarily during November of 2001. In most instances, the soldiers never returned to the studios to claim these portraits, because they had fled from the opposition forces, the US-backed Northern Alliance, as they advanced upon Kandahar.

Dworzak purchased the portraits from the studios and compiled them into a small volume, entitled simply, Taliban, which was first published in England by Trolley Books in 2003. Dworzak contextualizes these images within the society that forbade their existence, as he opens the book with photographed examples of Afghan street signs showing headless figures, even imported beauty products with the eyes and faces scratched from the images on the packaging. In contrast to these examples of erasure are the portraits of the Taliban soldiers that follow. Describing the portrait images in language that does not in some way imply judgment upon them is a difficult, perhaps impossible task. Even simply listing the items and elements present in the photographs seems to indicate a certain narrative, a narrative that hints towards contradictory symbols and mixed visual messages.

The subjects of these portraits are all men, most of them young, wearing turbans, who pose not only with their guns and rifles pointed either at the photographer or at each other, but also appear holding plastic, potted flowers. Many of them pose before backdrops depicting what appear to be Swiss chalets. Though the Taliban forbade this, some of the men hold hands or make other physical gestures of affection towards one another. The Taliban did not permit men to be clean-shaven, but some of the men do not have beards and most of the men’s eyes are lined with kohl. Many of the photographs were taken in black-and-white, and then were brightly hand-colored.

Taliban is available not only at traditional bookstores and online booksellers, but can also be occasionally found in hipster boutiques such as Urban Outfitters. A “Google” search of the book reveals that it has been reviewed in major publications such as The New York Times, and it has also been featured in Details, a men’s fashion and popular culture magazine. The Gay and Lesbian Review published a review of Taliban in its January/February issue of 2004. The book has also received attention online, on numerous personal blogs and websites. Clearly, Dworzak’s collection of Taliban portraits has captured the attention of a spectrum of Western viewers, many of whom are, based on the venues where they encounter this material, generally informed about visual and political culture and poised to interpret these images. The book’s merchandizing in trendier locales suggests that the portraits are also interesting to those with a taste for kitchy, orientalized, even fettishized iconography.

One possible explanation for the appeal of the photographs for Western viewers might lie in the contradictions we see in them. The writer of the article published about the book in The Gay and Lesbian Review, for example, suggests that the images are homoerotic, and because of this finds the images to reveal a clash between the subjects’ private behaviors and their public political allegiances that is difficult to reconcile. He writes that the images:

…reveal an intimacy we have trouble interpreting; we know the frame but don't recognize these pictures. These are men who are comrades, and perhaps more. They are also soldiers of a horrifically repressive and puritanical regime. How can one pose with flowers, arm around your buddy, kohl highlighting beautiful young eyes, and yet be a foot soldier for those who would punish you severely for such an abomination? (McMahon 42)

The author of this article writes eloquently about the images and clearly appreciates them not only as aesthetic objects but also, problematically, as cultural artifacts that evidence certain realities of life in Afghanistan during this time period. Yet, the author seems unaware that as he interprets the images in this way, a process of translating them or perhaps mistranslating them, according to his own system of cultural codes and contexts, is at work.

Emily Apter, a prominent translation theorist, cautions against using the term translation as “a synonym for interpretation, intermedial transposition, or transcoding” (Apter), because when we use the term “translation” metaphorically, we move away from the pure meaning of this term, which refers specifically to the work of taking a literary text written in one language and rendering it into another. While I respect Apter’s desire to preserve the purity of the term, I do believe that translation theory can inform our attempts to read images across cultures, and suggests an ethical methodology for such a practice. Just as words have long been understood, particularly in the field of structural linguistics, as signs operating within complex systems, images are also composed of visual signs that function to convey meaning. The images that Thomas Dworzak assembled in the book Taliban represent an intricate conversation between many parties. It is a conversation that, at its moment of articulation, could not have anticipated all of its eventual or potential participants. In the photographs, the subjects speak not only to the photographer who captured their images, but also engage in an unspoken dialog with their fellow subjects, with their personal and national histories, with their families and their wider culture, with the regime that they fought for, with their enemies, and ultimately, in a way that surely none of them could have imagined, with Western consumers who pause to thumb through the book as they shop for leggings at Urban Outfitters. These Taliban soldiers, who had their portraits made in secret and at great risk, become vulnerable in an entirely new way as these images become global commodities. It is our charge as educated and ethical viewers to approach these images in a way that honors that vulnerability and attempts to translate the uniqueness of the photographs through a sensitive and informed process of visual interpretation. Though reading an image is not the same as reading a novel, both images and novels are texts, and the work of theorists of translation can and should be applied to their decoding.

Translation theory enables us to consider the extent to which we are able to understand and interpret visual images across cultures. This question becomes critical in an age where reproducibility is not only possible but is the normal fate and condition of an image; in an age where photographs travel not only from hand to hand and paper to paper but can be electronically transmitted across the globe in seconds. Walter Benjamin comments on the way that the experience of reproduction changed the possibilities of for works of art in his fundamental essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” He writes: “Technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway” (Benjamin 254). Because photographs are reproducible, they can be taken from Kandahar and published in this book. We don’t have to travel to Afghanistan to see the photographs; therefore we can be in the strange position of accessing these intimate, secret images from Afghanistan without knowing anything at all about that country or its people. The images can be taken completely out of the context in which they were created and are therefore subject to endless possibilities for wacky juxtaposition. In Borders or Barnes and Noble, it is hard to predict where this kind of a book would be merchandised. It might be shelved in the Photography section, or it might be incongruously laid on a display table next to an Audrey Hepburn-inspired primer on charm. In the process, because these images are meeting us halfway, it is much more likely that they will be misunderstood, misread, and mistranslated. Perhaps the problem is that we, as consumers of visual culture, are unready as translators to engage in a relationship with these image texts.

Editors note: This is part one of a two-part article. Part two will become available in the coming weeks.