Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Documentary / Reportage »

one hundred gazes, one city. Kabul, November 2024.

These images are just a part of a larger project called "100Kabuli" realized in colaboration with the afghan photographer Sardar Hasani

Three years since the Taliban’s return to power, Afghanistan is often narrated through the distant lens of humanitarian crises or archival news footage. 100KABULI was born from the need to deconstruct this detached narrative and return to the essence: the individual. There are no captions, no political statements, and no interviews. In a time when many voices have been silenced or mediated, the photographic portrait remains the only space for freedom and self-affirmation.

The project adopts a rigorous, almost typological formal approach: black and white photography against a neutral background that isolates the subject from the chaos of a wounded yet vibrant capital. By removing the urban context, the viewer is forced into a frontal encounter. Without the crutch of a textual "story," it is the wrinkles, the calloused hands, the veils, and the proud or melancholy gazes that become the subject..

Each face is a microcosm encompassing daily survival. One sees the marks of those who have witnessed forty years of war, but also the freshness of a youth attempting to imagine a future in a world that seems to have forgotten them. The absence of interviews is not a lack, but a deliberate choice of respect: a refusal to label these individuals as mere "victims" or "protagonists" of foreign news.

100KABULI is a human mapping of a city in suspense. It is an exercise in radical empathy that asks the observer not to look for political answers, but to recognize a universal dignity that resists, against all odds, in front of the lens. These hundred portraits serve as a catalog of silent resistance—a visual testimony that humanity is the only image that consistently survives the shifts of History.