photojournalist Beb REYNOL
"I can never forget the delights of Kabul,
nor express the depth of my longing to return."
Zahiruddin Mohammed Babar, founder of the Moghul Empire.
It is the journey of an uncertain dream. A journey I have experienced while in Afghanistan. I spent nights sharing hotel floors with dozens of men. From across the room, old and young were confined to a sole purpose, a similar destiny, to find work and to live a life, and perhaps forget years of destructive warfare they survived.
From all over Afghanistan, the desire to go forward is unanimous and perhaps a dream becoming true. Kabul has seen unprecedented changes, but men found themselves engaged into hard labor to live in a city that lost its beauty. The lack of basic resources and constant isolation split thousands of young boys into crucial choices. Their youth became short, they were among men; they became men.
The image of the young boy changing a tire presents the essence of this matter. And the women were still conditioned behind a curtain of law.
Beb C. Reynol, Kabul, Afghanistan - 2004.
Coal miner, Afghanistan
Often working at a depth of more than 360 meters deep, the miners extra the mineral with only shovels and pickaxes in hand, battery powered lamps on top of their heads, and old equipment once imported from Czechoslovakia....read more...
Street Boys
Kandahar, Afghanistan
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the world was able to measure the massive level of disruption to social, economic, political and cultural life in Afghanistan. An estimated 30,000 to 50,000 orphans live in the streets of Kabul alone. Ironically, these children are the backbone of a traditional Afghan society that is trying to rebuild viable values for a peaceful future.