Kalam, Swat District, North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan, spring 1978, ©Luke Powell, 2006, (LP17.01.01).
In the spring of 1978 I arrived in Kabul with the intention of making photographs in Afghanistan for several months. The passes were still snowed in, so I put off journeys to the Hazarajat and Badakshan and instead took a journey of one month through the northern route to Herat and back around to Kabul. This used the one month visa that I received when I arrived by air. When I returned to Kabul my friend Abdul Wassey Nooisher, who often helped me get visas quickly, told me that I should leave the country for a while. "Do you remember how the country was cleared of tourists before Daud took over from the King? The government said that they were hosting an Islamic conference and issued no tourist visas for a time, so that no visitors were under foot when the coup came. Well, they are hosting another Islamic Conference." I suggested that he could get me a visa anyway, and that I would go deep into the Hazarajat where I would be out of the way, but he assured me that it was best for me to leave for a time. So, I went to Swat, and shot there for several weeks. Many parts of Pakistan and India are very interesting and beautiful, but these are larger countries with a more complex variety of cultures and levels of industrialization, which made them more daunting and complex projects for a young photographer than Afghanistan.