Few of us will easily forget those images. The masses of desperate Afghans running along the tarmac and away from the Taliban, their insignificance accentuated by the enormity of the aircraft that enshadowed them. Very few residents of Kabul wrestled themselves aboard a plane in those last, frenzied hours before the US officially withdrew from Afghanistan in August of 2021.
For those who did, for every miraculous tale of escape, a thousand more were left behind, to stay silent and hidden until the day came and the dust settled. Until it was safe enough for them to be written.
The acclaimed Australian photojournalist Andrew Quilty wasn't immediately among the press photographers on the runway that day. While his intrepid colleagues captured shots that, even to them, were unprecedented and astonishing, Quilty somehow had more important things to attend to.
In a way that befitted his stature as a photojournalist - as a six-time winner of a Walkley award, Australian journalism's highest honor - Andrew Quilty went in search of something different. As overladen, C17 military craft roared overhead, he calmly documented the transition from the perimeter: the new symbols of an old city disappearing behind ideology.
One of his more immediate concerns on that day, as he sped past Taliban checkpoints down dusty side streets on his motorcycle, was to catch what few of his peers had the composure to contemplate. For Quilty it wasn't only the chaos that demanded his attention.
Well away from the tarmac, it's easy to imagine Quilty as the thoughtful counter to the flashpoint. A meditative onlooker who had seen enough and then no longer wanted to be seen. Who widened his lens, left the hysteria and retreated slowly towards the background.
Appreciating this strategy, under fire and above the fray, goes some of the way to understanding the relationship between Quilty and the country that became his passion, a bond that he forged over an almost nine-year stint reporting, through his lens, the paradox that is Afghanistan.
It's a connection that has now evolved into August in Kabul, his first-ever book, an account of the fall of the city and his life photographing and living within it.
"I've never experienced an upheaval that has affected me so personally," Quilty says. "I spent so much time in one place and on one story. I became invested in it. And that upheaval was also such an existential moment for the city itself. I had begun to call the place home. It was where my friends and colleagues were."
And as that moment unfolded, Quilty was there to document his besieged neighbourhood undergo an abrupt and irreversible transformation. The national flags of Afghanistan were torn down. The blinding white of a thousand Taliban banners quickly replaced them. Colourful billboards promoting beauty parlours and female celebrities were painted over with monochromatic Qur'anic scripts. The protective barrier that had long protected the city centre from the threat of truck bombs was burnt down with blowtorches.
Moments after capturing these images, Quilty was approached and questioned by a Taliban soldier who then swiftly drove him away to a hidden location and another interrogation.
But if readers of this book are expecting fearsome encounters like this to be sensationalised and indulged upon, or to be as graphic as his photographs can so famously be, then they might want to look somewhere else.
For a debut work, it is a remarkably accomplished feat of detailed yet understated reportage. There are, of course, a collection of his arresting, heartbreaking photographs featured, but this time it is the words and the tales wrapped around them that matter most. Taken together they are stories that speak with a voice that could only stay silent for so long, interwoven and enlivened by an author whose own experiences only ever whisper at us from a distance.
Although his questioning by the Taliban that day came only hours before a deadly suicide bomb exploded nearby, Quilty writes about it from within a bigger, empathic picture.
Two days later Quilty was in the hands of the Taliban again, detained for 10 hours alongside another Western photographer, in a house commandeered by a senior leader. Somehow allowed to keep their mobile phones throughout the ordeal, the two captives spent most of their time alleviating the anxieties of friends on WhatsApp and by text message. "It was more of an inconvenience than anything else," he writes, before returning to stories of those, at least to him, faced even greater dangers.
When I asked Quilty whether he thought he drew courage in those moments - from the stories of embattled, resilient locals being overrun, yet again, by ideologues and outsiders - his answer came to me as an insight, cleverly disguised by his disarming humility. Quilty is evidently the last to admit it, but there is little doubt that he is as fearless as he is talented.
"Once the Taliban were in Kabul, had consolidated power and become the undisputed leaders of the city, I don't think dealing with them required courage" he says. "The Taliban are a big organisation. Their fighters always have to answer to their commanders so there's an element of safety that comes with that."
What the author is more inclined to admit to possessing is the innate, unspoken resolve to protect ourselves from the things that threaten and imperil us. It's a truth that helps to imbue those infamous tarmac images with a deeper texture and meaning. Danger is always a relative measurement. For those that had reason to fear the Taliban the most, fastening yourself to the undercarriage of a departing aircraft was less threatening than the alternative.
"I've often wondered if the mechanism of self-preservation, the one that kicks in, is a bit like desensitisation," Quilty says. "It's a type of disassociation. You try and put a barrier of sorts between yourself and the events around you.
"But I think I found it a lot harder to disassociate from what happened last year compared to what I had experienced in the past. Previously I had always been a step removed. I was able to draw away at the end of the day or at the end of the reporting trip."
One of the most difficult experiences for Quilty, which he was still able to depict in his book with an admirable degree of objectivity, was navigating the overflowing frontier of the evacuation gates. Quilty may have taken his time in the early stages of the exodus, taking pictures from the perimeter, but he was front and centre and helping whoever he could when the clock truly started to tick down.
It was during those hours that so many fates were ultimately decided, where families were divided or, even more tragically, forced to retreat and accept the impossibility of their escape.
For the most part, choosing who to save and who to leave behind were decisions left to those who had no real means to humanely make them. Overwrought aid workers and frightened government officials. Young US Marines, who had only recently been kids themselves, telling other children that there was no room on the plane for their parents.
"Towards the end of those last moments, " Quilty says, "when my friends and I were trying to help locals at the airport, it almost felt like we were playing God. We had to choose who we could help. That's never happened to me before. The choices we had to make had to come from our instincts."
August in Kabul, Melbourne University Publishing, $34.99
