Inside Afghanistans Bagram Airfield
Inside Afghanistans Bagram Airfield
Last December, the United States and its allies ended their official combat operations in Afghanistan, closed the infamous detention facility at Bagram Airfield, and left behind only a small force to conduct security training.
In order to photograph the life and experiences of Americans in Afghanistan at the end of this decade-long war, British photographer Edmund Clark embedded with American troops for nine days in October 2013 at Bagram Airfield, once the largest American military base in the country, where at its peak housed 40,000 military personnel and civilian contractors, many of whom, Clark says, never left the base during their service.
Their vision of Afghanistan is what they see over the perimeters, or represented inside the walls of enclaves like Bagram Airfield, writes Clark of his recently published book, The Mountains of Majeed, which has now transformed into an exhibition at the Flowers Gallery opening in London today.
Clarks interest in Bagram grew out of years spent examining the relationship between representation and politics. In his previous project, Guantanamo: If the Light Goes out, he photographed the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, its detention camp and the homes of released detainees. He then laid them out unordered to create the sense of disorientation familiar to the detainees.
For Clark, the similarities between Guantanamo Bay and Bagram are striking: Bagram is the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, while Guantanamo Bay is the oldest U.S. naval base overseas. Both are notorious for their treatment of detainees; in fact, many who ended up in Guantanamo had first passed through Bagram, Clark tells TIME.
Provided by Time Article Edmund Clark - Bagram-Day-2_0007-book
For the Americans fighting the war against terror abroad, however, these two bases are their home away from home. In Guantanamo, Clark photographed the navys small but full-fledged community, a similar approach he envisioned before his flight into Afghanistan. Yet once at the airfield, he was surprised by an overwhelming view of the Hindu Kush, a mountain never shy of military presence thats deeply intertwined with the countrys wobbly history.
Clarks visit happened to overlap with the Muslim religious holiday Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice) during which the insurgency tends to flare up. For some nights, he had to stay in a bunker, trying to fall asleep amid the sound of incoming rockets from militants hidden in the dark mountains outside the heavily secured enclave.
From inside his fortification, however, these mountains were portrayed in a much different, even tranquil, light: they were picturesque, romanticized by a series of large-scale paintings screwed to the wall of the bases dining hall. Their painter is known only by the name of Majeed.
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Inside Afghanistans Bagram Airfield