Zalmai’s extraordinary and unforgettable photographs capture the slow, distressing drift of exile and dispossession: spectral figures against a stormy ski; a sheared row of peaks frame a figure like a sacred relic; horizons of men, both of this world and of some timeless land. This is a documentation of a journey through ambiguous territories - from Cuba to India, Mali to the Philippines, Indonesia to Egypt, and return to Zalmai’s native Afghanistan - a search for place when one’s own land has been destroyed. The changing interplay of composition, light, and faces infuses the photographs in this book, which speak of transformation and disenfranchisement not just of place but of spirit. Most of all, his work is about the fragility of presence. Moving through space in time, standing in place, a breathless, near-hallucinatory consciousness is felt in each frame. The present seems a fragile membrane enveloping the past, making a subtle statement about man’s relation to the world he inhabits. This artist, born in Afghanistan and now carrying a Swiss passport, has lived life traveling lightly among different peoples, a citizen of the world in its largest sense. He has pursued the aesthetic of a landscape of faces and forms memorable for its poetic resonance. These are images that have been shaped over centuries by ideas carried in men’s souls - not places given by the gods in their placid beauty. Instead, the interiors of these photographs are tangled and jagged, meandering and menacing, of this earth even as they reach to the sky. In the aggregate, they sketch a fragmented story of dispossession, of a voyage of the spirit, of the complex emotions of return. An exhibition of the work will open at the Musee d’Elysee, Lausanne in October 2002, before travling internationally. Essay by Daniel Girardin, Curator, Musee d’Elysee, Lausanne.
