|* photos. Masood Kamandy.
A New York based photographer Masood Kamandy went to live and teach in Afghanistan. He came up with a very brave idea of the first photography courses at Kabul University.
As he is writing himself on his website in the section about the project information:
"This is a unique and hopeful time in the history of Afghanistan, and one that deserves to be captured by Afghan artists for the world to see. Their perceptions of their own culture and history will give the rest of the world a unique lens to see the Afghan people and landscape through... Photography is learning how to see within a frame, isolating what is important, and, at times, confronting with a critical eye the reality before us".
Working with Stephen Frailey (Photography Department Chair at the School of Visual Arts), the Visual Arts Foundation, and other many generous sponsors, they set out to establish a 4 year photography degree program at Kabul University. The program began on March 22, 2005, and the first graduates will get their Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography in 2009.
Masood Kabul was keeping the diary of the progress in his weblog "Dispatch from Kabul".
I really enjoyed his stories. For example, he was teaching Photoshop to the class of girls and...: "Our first project was transforming a scanned image in order to better understand screen resolution versus print resolution, layers, levels and curves.
You guessed it: our subject was my scan of Mullah Omar, in many ways the arch nemesis of these educated women in positions of power at this new lab. When his picture came up on the screen, they giggled and a hand went up:
“Professor Masood, is there any way in Photoshop that we can remove his beard? I think that would be a very useful skill.” By the end of class, we had made him pink, cloned in a good eye over his bad one, and lightened his beard a bit."
Unfortunately, he didn't stay and left after 4 and a half months of studying. You can follow his posts and read about the reason. He started to feel much of a freak there and missed his home and people he loves.
He worked on this project for 3 years!
posted by Aleksandra Birjukova @ 17.10.05
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