Leaves of Grass 1

“Leaves of Grass”
‘When two elephants fight, it is only the grass that suffers.”

-African Proverb

“Leaves of Grass” is an intimate portrait of Afghanistan, a country looked at but rarely seen, we often only see a country in the constant throes of war. We divide simplistically the country’s people in to those who visit war upon others and then those upon whom war is visited. However the most common narrative is the one that is lived quietly and spun daily in the lives of ordinary Afghans. It is this narrative of quiet, personal industry, one that is shaping up to be the dominant narrative of Afghanistan where up to now we have thought of a people only as those irrevocably linked with conflict.

These images then illustrate for us all the ambiguity and tragedy of people finding their way in war. For some, work is the descent in to perennial night in mines, for others it is the moral conundrum of farming poppy that provides half the world’s heroin. Categories of right and wrong dissolve in a bowl of necessity. This then is a hope of showing the undocumented side of Afghan lives, attempting to wrestle images that show a different cadence of life apart from that conflict.