August 4 – 27, 2005
Paul Seawright was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum, London, to respond to the attacks of Sept 11th and the war in Afghanistan. He went to Afghanistan after much of the devastation had been unleashed on the country, after most of the fighting that had seen the country’s liberation from the Taliban was over. Avoiding the trappings of an exoticizing vision, best typified by the photojournalist’s portrait of Afghanistan as a spectacle of ruins, his series of pictures arer e, subdued, understated and quiet. Seawright’s responses to the terrain of the destroyed and heavily mined desert landscapes of the country both draw upon, extend and rework the distinctive aesthetic and conventions he had established through earlier landscape photographs, made first within his home city, Belfast, and more recently on the fringes of a number of European cities. In war-torn Afghanistan, Seawright is less concerned with the visible scars of war, but instead the hidden malevolence of its landscapes.