French photographer Sandra Calligaro has spent much of her career documenting the lives of ordinary people in Afghanistan, especially women and children. Her exhibition at the annual Bayeux Calvados-Normandy war correspondents' festival is both a tribute to Afghan resilience and a declaration of love for a country torn apart by conflict.
In 2007, after studying art and photography in Paris, Calligaro went to Afghanistan for what was meant to be a short trip, pursuing her dream of becoming a war correspondent.
She ended up staying for more than a decade, capturing the complexities of a country that grew on her over time.
It was in Kabul where she became a professional photographer, she tells RFI.
The exhibition “From Kabul with Love” is a selection of 50 photos from 2007 to 2022, depicting the extraordinary panorama of her time observing people going about their daily lives, despite the constant danger, crises and conflict.
“In Afghanistan, all the encounters I’ve had are noteworthy because the stories are not trivial. They are not always happy stories, even if the people are resilient. But it's not just drama, there's also joy,” she explains.
From the start, Calligaro focused on photographing women. As a woman, she had access to homes that male journalists found difficult to reach.
Paradoxically, she said, being a foreign female journalist gave her slightly more freedom, as she wasn’t expected to follow all the strict rules Afghan women faced, though she did cover her head in the presence of Taliban members.
Over the years, Calligaro built up a body of work that carefully documented the lives of girls and women and their ever-diminishing freedoms.
Becoming a mother also helped her take better stock of the situation for women, and they became true heroes to her, she says.
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Turning point
When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, the shock was immense, Calligaro recalls. Although not present in the country during the takeover, she arrived shortly afterwards to document the changes.
She mostly stopped photographing outdoors, finding it too dangerous. While she admired the strength of Afghan women, she also sympathised with the men she met.
“Women's lives are hard, they rely on sisterhood,” she explains. “But it is not an easy society for men either. Men have a lot of pressure on their shoulders when it comes to the women in their family. And there are very few prospects.”
Calligaro describes meeting a 22-year-old man who was not lucky enough to go to one of the international schools because he grew up in a small village. His only instruction came from the madrasa – a Koranic school.
She photographed him standing guard with a gun in a palace in Kabul, a city he’d never seen before. His eyes are wide with wonder as he takes in the opulent, white marble hall.
“A Kalashnikov was put in his hands at the age of 12. Whether he chose to be Taliban, I don't know. I don't think it's an informed choice in any case,” Calligaro says.
Many Afghans asked her for help obtaining visas to leave, but Calligaro had to tell them it wasn’t that simple.
“It's very hard to face your own helplessness in this situation,” she says. “It makes me doubly sad because it’s a country that I particularly like.”
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Nuanced perspective
For the exhibition, it was important for Calligaro to show Afghanistan in all its complexity with what she calls “nuance and tenderness”.
Although violence and conflict are never far away, she has chosen to keep them out of the frame. Instead, she invites the viewer to sense a life beyond what is presented in the news.
“I tried to show that in life, in societies, nothing is fixed, white or black, it’s not the good guys on one side or the bad guys on the other. I tried to show that history is not linear,” she says.
"From Kabul with Love" is one of eight exhibitions at this year’s Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents’ festival, known as the Prix Bayeux.
The event kicked off on Monday and will host a programme of round tables, conferences, screenings, a book fair and the prize ceremony itself on Saturday evening.
The exhibitions remain open to the public until mid-November.
The president of the jury is award-winning CNN journalist Clarissa Ward, the first and only Western journalist to enter Gaza last December without explicit Israeli permission or escort.
While the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is very much in the spotlight this year, there is a focus on Russian war crimes in conflicts over the years including in Ukraine, as well as a look back at April 1975, a crucial turning point for wars in Cambodia and Vietnam.
