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  • Jawad, who like many Afghans uses just the one name, out playing with an old tyre in the Mikrorayan district of Kabul.

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • Shah-do-Shamshira Mosque is known as the Mosque of the King with Two Swords. It was built in the 1920s on the order of King Amanullah’s mother on the site of one of Kabul’s first mosques named in honour of an early Muslim king who died fighting Hindu inva

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The Sham-e-Paris (‘Parisian Evenings’) wedding hall in the Taymani neighbourhood. Common in Pakistan, these huge wedding complexes have sprung up all over Kabul with dining and entertainment halls to seat a thousand on each floor and even an on-site honey

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • On the very northern edge of Kabul. A shipping container is re-purposed as home to men working in a yard casting concrete blast walls. Each section, when sold to foreign embassies or the military, fetches $1000 per piece.

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The whole eastern side of Kabul, for miles along both sides of the Jalalabad Road is one huge logistics yard capable of supplying the foreign military and rapidly growing embassies with everything they might need from a single cup of coffee right through

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • A view of Kabul city centre from Bala Burj.

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • At a music school on Kabul, boys are taught the traditional Afghan instrument the rubab. Difficult to play, it is a skill which nearly became extinct due to the Taliban prohibition on secular music.

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
  • Strongly pro-Taliban refugees. For the photograph, they chose to partially cover their faces.

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • Some of the nonsensical property development taking place in Kabul. The district of the city, Karte Char Chateh, is remembered by Kabulis as part of the bazaar which was burned by the British in 1842 as collective punishment for the killing of the British

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The districts of Wazir Akhbar Khan and Sherpur, home to all the NGOs and contractors, occupy the site of the former British fortress from the Second Anglo-Afghan War, ‘the Cantonment’. Glitzy, kitschy ‘poppy-palaces’, flung upon a hectic property boom aft

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • The peripheries of the city of Kabul, especially to the north and east are endless building sites. Since most of the documentation concerning land title was lost during the war, much of this speculative and illegal construction is concerned more with esta

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
  • At Waisalabad high above West Kabul. It has taken 26 men from the Mine Detection Centre and four de-mining dogs more than three months to clear mines from an area the size of a few soccer pitches. Kabul’s rapid expansion has increased pressure for buildin

    Simon Norfolk
    2011
    View by appointment
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