Restaging Afghanistan: Trapped in the Cycle of Conflict Photographies

Abstract

Western, especially British interventions in Afghanistan, parallel the long history of photography. This article examines the resulting archive and considers its ongoing influence on the traditions of conflict photography through the concept of the ‘Feedback Loop’ coined by photographer Tim Hetherington. Hetherington’s work is used as a departure point for an examination of the archival legacy of the male-gendered western gaze in ongoing western incursions. It focusses on Hetherington and contemporary practitioners to position and understand a repetitive cycle of photographic witnessing informed by the archive. Its perspective is on western traditions in the context of picturing Afghanistan and explores what underpins such traditions and how contemporary practitioners are rethinking, rememorizing and now restaging Afghanistan as a site of post-imperial ‘conflict’. It argues that what Hetherington identified as a ‘feedback loop’ is part of a much older tradition of picturing conflict and the combatants at its heart.