Daniel Malikyar’s Afghanistan in Color

Four men share a watermelon and a pot of tea, seated in a yellow swan-shaped pedal boat on water of an improbable blue. The image opens the book, and for a moment you question its authenticity, so thoroughly does it contradict what the West believes it knows about Afghanistan. It is, however, scrupulously accurate. This is Band-e Amir, in Bamiyan province, where six lakes rise in tiers at roughly three thousand meters behind natural travertine dams. Designated the country’s first national park in 2009, the site draws more than a hundred thousand visitors a year. But in August 2023, the Taliban’s morality police barred women from entering, on the grounds that they were not observing the veil correctly.

The sheer eruption of color in Daniel Malikyar’s images comes as a surprise. Scarlet dresses worn by women in the Wakhan cut against the gray flanks of the Hindu Kush; street vendors ferry clusters of fluorescent balloons by bicycle across the dusty plains of Kandahar. There are the turquoise tiles of the shrine at Mazar-i-Sharif, and the almost unreal green of grass along a mountain stream. Flashes of ordinary life, all the more intense and unexpected because international photography has long rendered Afghanistan in earth tones and desaturated grays, a palette that clings to images of war and desolation.

Asked by Blind about this choice, Daniel Malikyar rejects any suggestion of a statement. “Color is present all over Afghanistan,” he explains. “The clothing, textures, food, landscapes, architecture and small slices of life all provide pops of color that catch the eye. It was important to me to document this because it’s a core visual fabric of Afghan daily life, yet feels seldom seen or associated with the country. The intention was simply to share that color very much exists in beautiful shades and tones across Afghanistan.”

Born in Los Angeles in 1995, Daniel Malikyar belongs to that generation of the diaspora who first knew Afghanistan only through inherited stories. His parents and grandparents left the country in 1979, weeks before Soviet troops crossed the border. He has been traveling there since 2018, province by province, drawing on fluent Dari, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages alongside Pashto, to explain his intentions and secure permissions a foreigner would be denied.

His relationship with the country also begins with a photograph. His grandfather Nasrat served as governor of Bamiyan province, which he helped bring electricity to, and his mother Maral spent part of her childhood there, in a house that looked directly onto the Buddhas. Every morning before school, the boy would sit in the passenger seat of his father’s Chevrolet Astro, studying a print of those statues taken before the Taliban destroyed them in 2001, while the radio ran the day’s war headlines. A photograph in his hands, a news bulletin in his ears: he understood early that the two were not describing the same country.

That father, Daoud, occupies a place in the book’s history that nothing quite prepares you for. In a Kabul kindergarten in the late 1960s, he was Khaled Hosseini’s very first friend. Their mothers were closely related, their fathers colleagues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The author of The Kite Runner, whom Daniel Malikyar calls Uncle Khaled, is not writing a foreword of convenience here: he is writing about the son of his oldest friend, and about a country both families left at the same moment.

When the photographer laid out his plans, the novelist asked what his motivation was. The answer, as Hosseini recounts it, arrives as a volley of questions: why does no one ever talk about Afghan poets, Afghan music, Afghan hospitality? Why is the country recognized only in moments of crisis? Why do outsiders always dominate the stories told about it? Hosseini reads in this a pride with nothing flag-waving about it, tinged with grief, which he takes to be an act of resistance: “you don’t get to define where my family came from.”

The book unfolds in regional chapters. “I spent countless hours sequencing and curating the flow,” the photographer notes. “Many photographs had to be left out to make what I felt was the most cohesive body of work.” The result follows an emotional geography rather than an itinerary: horsemen at full gallop in a cloud of dust on a Pamir plateau, a boy in a saffron tunic standing on a mud roof in Nuristan, a volleyball game improvised in the raking light of evening.

At Mazar-i-Sharif, the Shrine of Hazrat Ali, a fifteenth-century sanctuary sheathed entirely in tilework, offers him a sumptuous subject. Hundreds of doves wheel above the courtyard, and local belief holds that any bird entering the precinct eventually turns white. In the photograph, two minuscule figures cross the plaza, dwarfed by the turquoise domes. The color here is no accident: in Persian architecture, blue speaks of sky, water, and the nearness of the divine. Builders willed it so six centuries ago, at the precise opposite of the austerity now preached by Kabul’s rulers.

The book’s beating heart, however, lies in the Wakhan, the high-altitude corridor in the country’s far northeast that war never reached. Daniel Malikyar grew up there in his imagination, surrounded by Afghan women whose composure he recalls: a grandmother who taught at the University of Kabul, another who was an ambassador’s daughter, a mother the family made its style icon. What he brings back are images of disarming directness. A woman with a weathered face holds a kitten against her beaded, embroidered dress. Girls in red leap a stream under the gaze of an older woman seated in the grass. In some villages, he notes, no one had ever seen a camera: he found curiosity and no reluctance.

It was in Paris, sitting with Reza Deghati, the French-Iranian photojournalist who founded a training institute in Kabul for Afghan reporters, that Daniel Malikyar discovered his blind spot: to show the whole of Afghanistan, his elder told him, you have to include the winter. A few months later he was back, in the depths of the cold season. Iced-over roads, breakdowns one after another, hands and face going numb within minutes. At Band-e Amir, where he returned to photograph the lakes under snow, the road froze and stranded him; a local horseman took him in, put him up for the night, and led him back to the cliffs the next morning. The book thus observes a kind of unity of place: the yellow swan on the cover and those same waters locked in ice share a single setting, six months apart.

This habit of returning applies to people as well. By passing through the same places again and again, Daniel Malikyar assembled a gallery of figures he calls Afghanistan’s national treasures: not monuments, but men. Mama Janan, a seventy-four-year-old flute player he met in Ghazni, where his family originates, and of whose portrait he says he can still hear the music. Abdul Samad, who has maintained the same Moskvitch taxi for over forty years in a city grown unrecognizable around him. Noor Mohammed, unfailingly seated in the same spot at the Kah Faroshi bird market. A generation is thinning out, taking with it skills globalization will not replace. “What remains are the photographs,” Daniel Malikyar writes.

Haji Mirzaman belongs to this fellowship. Seventy-six years old, a familiar figure to foreign correspondents, regularly photographed by AFP and catalogued by the Afghan Box Camera Project, he is among the last practitioners of the kamra-e-faoree, the wooden box that serves as camera and darkroom at once and yields a print in minutes. “He is keeping a craft alive that used to exist throughout the streets of most major cities in the country,” Daniel Malikyar says. He went to the man’s home to photograph him; he left having been photographed himself. “My intention was to make a portrait of him to highlight his story, but he insisted we do so of each other. While he made my portrait in the courtyard of his home, we had a very casual conversation about his humble origins and how his camera process worked.”

What struck the younger man had less to do with the elder’s technique than with what passed between them. “It felt special for two Afghan photographers from vastly different backgrounds, generations, and realities to connect over a shared passion and heritage.” The frame then widened. “He has taught his children and grandchildren how to create portraits with the box camera as well, so I opted to include his grandchildren in the portrait as they also represent the future of an art form that I hope will be preserved through his legacy. I’ll always cherish and appreciate the exchange of portraits we made of each other that morning in Kabul.”

Two photographs survive that morning. One Afghan from Kabul, another from Los Angeles, recognizing one another.

Afghanistan by Daniel Malikyar is published by teNeues and is available for 70€.