Arms Against Fury: Magnum Photographers in Afghanistan

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Arms Against Fury examines the dramatic struggle of the Afghan people through the lens of Magnum photographers, dating back to co-founder George Rodgerx2019;s documentation of the countryx2019;s role in World War II. Ever since, Magnumx2019;s intrepid photographers have crisscrossed the countryx2019;s striking landscape from the Central Asian steppes to the parched southern desert by way of the Hindu Kush mountains surrounding Kabul and the adjacent Panjshir Valley. As early as the 1950s, Eve Arnold and Marc Riboud filed unprecedented stories from a legendary Shangri-La, showing a small kingdom struggling for statehood against the forces of underdevelopment and unfortunate geographic position during the Cold War. The ultimate overthrow of the monarchy and brutal liquidation of Afghanistanx2019;s constitutional government in 1978 heralded the arrivalof Soviet-style communism. Peasants in Nuristan rebelled immediately and initiated a jihad that was covered first by Raymond Depardon and then by Steve McCurry, and later by renowned photojournalist Abbas, who also focused on the progress of the mujahedin, who eventually faced a massive Red Army invasion and savage aerial bombardments. The victory against the Soviets also signaled the beginning of a civil war that began in 1992. Documented by Luc Delahaye, Christopher Steele-Perkins, Abbas, and Steve McCurry, Afghan militias destroyed large swathes of Kabul. The Taliban militia subdued warring factions in 1996 and proclaimed an Islamic emirate. Steele-Perkins was one of the few journalists to report from Afghanistan during this period of theocratic tyranny. In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States, the hated Taliban were shaken from power by a loose alliance of mujahedin backed by American forces. Yet nothing seemed to remedy the miserable spectacle of a ruined country littered with ten million land mines and thousands of innocent victims of the hi-tech war on terror. The future of Afghanistan, as depicted by Abbas, Eve Arnold, Luc Delahaye, Thomas Dworzak, Alex Majoli, Steve McCurry, and Francesco Zizola, remains uncertain at best. Containing additional photographic work by Ian Berry, Elliott Erwitt, Stuart Franklin, Philip Jones Griffiths, Susan Meiselas, and Wayne Miller; commentary by the photographers; and several illustrated essays, Arms Against Fury will become an indispensable reference for documentary studies, social history, and critical photography.

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Magnum Photos, established in April 1947, summoned "concerned" photojournalists to unite in defense of free expression and individual copyright in an era of nascent magazine conglomerates who demanded total ownership of their correspondents' pictures. Steeped in the euphoria of Europe's liberation from wartime terror, the founders of Magnum envisioned a cooperative venture that would guarantee a truly independent media. It was this dream, tethered to the political foundations of social democracy, which brought together founders Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, Robert Capa, and David Seymour (Chim). More than fifty years later, the calling of Magnum's peer-selected members has not changed. They continue the struggle to represent history through the lens of personal experience, competing against all odds in an age of predatory media giants. Robert Dannin has edited the work of photojournalists for twenty-five years. As the editorial director of Magnum from 1985 to 1990, he produced Sebastiao Salgado Jr.'s "An Archaelogy of the Industrial age, " eventually published as Workers (Aperture). He was also the text editor for Jame Nactwey's Inferno (Phaidon). Dannin now teaches urban anthropology at New York University and recently published Black Pilgrimage to Islam (Oxford University Press).