BURKE + NORFOLK:
Photographs from the War in Afghanistan
John Burke and Simon Norfolk
Dewi Lewis Publishing
English
Text by David Campbell, Simon Lowe and Simon Norfolk
Hardback
168 pages
365mm x 290mm
2011
ISBN: 978-1-907893-11-7
Simon Norfolk’s 2002 book Afghanistan: chronotopia is now recognised as a classic of photography. It established Norfolk’s reputation as one of the leading photographers in the world and has been exhibited at more than thirty venues worldwide.
In 2010 Simon Norfolk returned to Afghanistan. This time he followed in the footsteps of the nineteenth century Irish photographer John Burke, a superb, yet virtually unknown, war photographer. Burke’s eloquent and beautiful photographs of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-1880) provide an extraordinary record. Using unwieldy wet-plate collodion negatives and huge wooden cameras he shot landscapes, battle-fields, archaeological sites, street scenes, portraits of British officers and ethnological group portraits of Afghans in what amounts to a richly detailed record of an Imperial encounter. The range is tremendously broad, yet suffused with a delicate humanism. These are also the first ever pictures made in Afghanistan. With this book, one hundred and thirty years too late, John Burke’s time has come at last.
Norfolk’s new work looks at what happens when you add half a trillion US war dollars to an impoverished and broken country such as Afghanistan. Very loosely re-photographic in nature, the work is presented as an artistic collaboration between Burke and Norfolk. It features photographs by Burke never before published as well as Norfolk’s new pictures from Kabul and Helmand.
About the Artists:
Simon Norfolk has received innumerable awards for his work including The European Publishers Award for Photography, The Olivier Rebbot Award (Foreign Press Club of America), and The Infinity Award (ICP, New York). His work is in major public and private collections throughout the world. His most recent exhibition, in March 2011, was shown at the Queen’s Palace in the Bagh-e Babur garden in Kabul. Supported by The World Collections Programme and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, it incorporated both Norfolk and Burke’s photographs alongside work resulting from a series of workshops by Simon Norfolk with Afghan photographers.
Norfolk’s Website
John Burke was a photographer, best known for his photographs of the Second Anglo-Afghan War between 1878–1880. Burke was born in Ireland where he was a tradesman. He applied for a job in the British Army as an official photographer but travelled to Afghanistan at his own expense using heavy cameras that would have needed transporting on pack animals through mountainous regions.
About the Publisher:
Dewi Lewis Publishing is a partnership owned and run by Caroline Warhurst and Dewi Lewis.
Founded in 1994, its photography list has an international reputation and includes books by leading British and international photographers such as William Klein, Martin Parr, Simon Norfolk, Fay Godwin, Tom Wood, Sergio Larrain, Frank Horvat, John Blakemore, Paolo Pelegrin and Bruce Gilden. The aim of the company is to bring to the attention of a wider public, accessible but challenging contemporary photography by both established and lesser known practitioners. The company has a worldwide distribution network and is recognised as one of the leading photographic publishers in the world. It publishes around 20 new titles each year.
Publisher Website
Book Materials and Specifications:
Quarter-bound oversized hardcover book. Both colour and black and white plates in this book, plates ranging in size from 100mm x 75mm to 580mm x 300mm.
