Hearing their voices

Photographer Lana Šlezić arrived in Kabul in 2004 on a six-week assignment intending to show how women’s lives had improved since the fall of the Taliban three years earlier. Discovering that human rights violations such as denial of education, forced marriage, and forced prostitution had in fact persisted, she extended her project for two years, traveling the war-torn country with her translator and friend, Forzana. They were welcomed by Afghan women into the private spaces, where they documented widespread physical abuse, death by suicide (commonly by dousing themselves with cooking oil and setting themselves on fire), and so-called “honor killings” at the hands of male relatives.

These beautiful but unsparing photographs appeared in Kyoto Journal’s first digital issue as part of a special feature entitled, “Restoring Dignity.” In his introduction to the section, Managing Editor Ken Rodgers observed that “these stories… all deal with how individuals, through active support and their own committed efforts, are overcoming dehumanizing circumstances to regain not only self-respect, but a restored sense of humanity.”

Lana Šlezić’s photograph showing a sex worker’s ragged finery was part of a series of images which accompanied an article by Deny Y. Béchard entitled “Hearing their Voices” On the Afghan Women’s Writing Project. Now on hiatus, it provided women with laptops, memory sticks, and internet access so that “the world could hear from Afghan women directly, not in the words of male relatives or the media.” 
They were the lucky ones. Šlezić’s photographs focus on the stories of most Afghan women, who are illiterate. Bought and sold, beaten and slaughtered like cattle, the women in Šlezić’s stunningly beautiful photographs nevertheless manage to evade their patriarchal culture’s incessant and often violent efforts to define their femininity merely in terms of being men’s sexual partners and bearers of their children.