PHOTOGRAPHS FROM AFGHANISTAN (1984-2004)
Introduction

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural and man-made disasters, and exclusion from health care in more that 75 countries.

MSF was founded in 1971 as the first non-governmental organization to both provide emergency medical assistance and bear witness publicly to the plight of people it assists. A private nonprofit association, MSF is an international network with sections in 19 countries.

MSF began working in Afghanistan in 1980, shortly after the Soviet invasion. Small medical teams undertook clandestine cross-border operations to reach people stranded in areas hardest-hit by the turmoil. MSF continued to open programs over the next 24 years: conducting surgery as fighting raged in Kabul during the mujahadeen wars; providing medical care to women and advocating on their behalf during the rise of the Taliban; and running clinics for people displaced by the fighting during the Taliban years and in the aftermath of the US-led military intervention.

On June 2, 2004, five MSF aid workers were assassinated while traveling in a clearly marked MSF vehicle. At the time, 80 MSF international volunteers and 1,400 Afghan staff were providing health care in 13 provinces. These teams faced an increasingly violent and chaotic environment, in which aid workers had become targets for military factions, and where the lines between military and humanitarian action had become increasingly blurred. Unable to ensure the security of its teams, MSF closed all of its medical programs in Afghanistan in July 2004. Click here for more information.

MSF would like to thank the many accomplished photojournalists whose
photographs appear together for the first time in this exhibit.
Thanks to them, we are able to bear witness to the suffering of the Afghan people,
who continue to live in conflict and uncertainty.

Visitors to the exhibit interested in purchasing photographs are invited to contact the photographers directly:

Sebastian Bolesch is a freelance photographer based in Berlin, Germany. His work has appeared in Der Spiegel, Stern , and other prominent publications. He began working with international non-governmental organizations, including MSF, in 1992. He has worked in many humanitarian crises, including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Sudan.  mail@sebastianbolesch.de

Tim Dirven began his career as a freelance photographer, with his first international assignment to Romania and the former Yugoslavia. Since 1996 he has worked full-time for the Belgian newspaper De Morgen . He is represented by Panos Pictures in London and Hollandse Hoogte in Amsterdam. In 1999, he received a Fuji Euro Press Award with a report on Yemen, and was awarded third prize in the 2002 World Press Photo Awards for his report about the daily lives of refugees in Afghanistan.  tim.dirven@skynet.be

Jean-Pierre Favreau has been a freelance photographer since 1980 with many exhibitions to his credit. He lives in Paris and has published four books, “Arts plastiques en France,” “Blues Outremer,” “Rue Caraibes,” and “Incertaines Cites.” He works for VIVA Agency and contributes regularly to Le Monde. He has traveled extensively in Asia and the Americas, and is currently working on a project in Japan which will be exhibited in China in January 2005.  jp.favreau@wanadoo.fr

Jean-Marc Giboux is a Chicago-based freelance photojournalist represented by Gamma. He covers news and feature stories in the US and Asia and is working on a long-term project on polio supported by a grant from the Rotary Foundation and the World Health Organization.  jmgiboux@earthlink.net

Olivier Jobard has worked for the SIPA Agency since 1992. A Paris-based photographer, he has covered many international crises, including Croatia, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory Coast. He was present in Baghdad during the US invasion of Iraq. He is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Fuji Prize for his coverage of Srebenica, the Picture of the Year Award for his work in Chechnya, and the 2004 Care International Award for Humanitarian Reporting for his most recent work in the Darfur region of Sudan.  ojobard@noos.fr

Carl de Keyzer has been a freelance photographer since 1982, and is represented by Magnum. He has taught photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, and at the Higher Institute of Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, as well as at L'Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, France. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, as well as Magnum international touring exhibitions and in dozens of books. He has received several awards, including ICP's “Eugene Smith Award” in 1990.  carl@carldekeyzer.com

Ton Koene is the Deputy Emergency Director for MSF based in Amsterdam, Holland. Prior to this, he worked for several years as an emergency coordinator for MSF, in Uganda, Tajikistan, Mongolia, and most recently Darfur, Sudan. He has several years' experience as a photographer, with a focus on humanitarian and refugee issues. www.tonkoene.com

Robert Knoth began his career as a rock photographer. In 1994, he covered the civil war in Somalia, and went on to work in Afghanistan, Sudan, Kosovo, Croatia, Angola, the US, Burkina Faso, Thailand, Israel, Kazakhstan, Russia, Hungary, and Kenya. He has been published regularly in Holland in De Volkskrant , Nieuwe Revu and Metro, and has been published in France, Germany, Belgium and the UK. He received several awards for his stories on Burkina Faso, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, and Angola at the Zilveren Camera, the annual contest for photojournalists in Holland. His 1999 work in Angola earned him 2nd prize in the category 'People in the News' in the 1999 World Press Photo Contest.  robertknoth@solcon.nl

Didier Lefèvre has been a freelance photographer since 1993. His photographs have appeared in the French publications Liberation, L'Express, and L'Equipe Magazine. His work with MSF has taken him to Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Malawi, and Ivory Coast, while other international assignments have taken him to Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, China, Albania, Macedonia, Israel, Rwanda, Kosovo, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. His work has been exhibited in Paris, Perpignan, and Toulouse. He is the co-author, with Emanuel Guibert and Frederic Lemercier, of “Le Photographe,” a book documenting his time in Afghanistan through photographs and comic strips. Volume Two has just been released in France.  didierlefevre@free.fr

Kadir van Lohuizen has worked as a photojournalist since 1988 and is now affiliated with the French agency Agence Vu. His work has been published in Vrij Nederland , Trouw , NRC Handelsblad , de Volkskrant, De Morgen, Mare, Paris Match, The Independent, Newsweek and Time. He has traveled extensively and has been honored many times. In 1999 he published a book about Tibet.  kadir@inter.nl.net

Benno Neeleman began his professional career as a photographer in Holland in 1986. He first accompanied MSF in 1990, and began to focus on international humanitarian crises. In the past 12 years he has traveled to 80 countries, working for a variety of non-governmental organizations.  bennoneeleman@yimage.net

Mattias Ohlson is a logistician for MSF whose first mission took him to northern Afghanistan at the end of 2001. Since then he has worked in Sierra Leone, again in Afghanistan, and most recently in Darfur, Sudan. He is an amateur photographer who likes to document on his digital camera what he sees in the course of his work with MSF.   info@mattias-ohlson.se

Stephan Vanfleteren is a Belgian photographer affiliated with Lookat. His documentary work covers disappearing phenomena of everyday life in his homeland Belgium as well as current events in conflict zones such as Kosovo or Afghanistan. He also works for De Morgen newspaper. Photographs from his recent book “Elvis & Presley,” a collaboration with Robert Huber, is currently on display in various galleries in Europe. vanfleteren.Stephan@pandora.be

Teun Voeten is a Dutch photographer based in Brussels whose work is used worldwide by relief organizations. He has worked in the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Colombia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, North Korea, Iraq, and Liberia. His books include “Tunnel People,” an account of five months spent living with homeless people in an old rail road tunnel in Manhattan; “A Ticket To,” a book about forgotten conflicts, and "How de Body. Hope and Horror in Sierra Leone," a book on child soldiers. Voeten's work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Magazine, Newsweek, Granta, Details, and the Village Voice. teunvoeten@aol.com