Journey to Afghanistan: Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Photos from the 1930’s November 11 – December 12, 2005 |
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Even today the mountain passes and back roads of Afghanistan are remote and mysterious places. How much more isolated and strange did they seem to Western eyes in the 1930s. “Journey to Afghanistan:Photographs of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey from the 1930s by Annemarie Schwarzenbach,” on view at Baruch College’s Mishkin Gallery, Friday, November 11 through Monday, December 12, provides a rare and riveting glimpse of a nation and a region that is at once majestic and fearsome, hospitable and dangerous. Reared in Switzerland in a family of the “grande bourgeoisie,” Annemarie Schwarzenbach became an artist and an adventuress whose restless spirit took her on travels through the villages of Afghan tribesmen, through the Hindu Kush and the Kyber pass, and on to Turkestan, Balutchistan (now Pakistan), Iran, Iraq, Syria and British India. Everywhere she went, Schwarzenbach took her camera, producing photographs of stunning beauty and exoticism. Also a writer, Schwarzenbach kept journals of her travels and produced a prodigious amount of prose, including novels, travelogues and articles, some filled with astute observations of the people and places she had seen. Yet, for all her adventures, hers was a tragic life, marred by morphine addiction, and cut short by a bicycle accident in 1942. Her black-and-white photos, with their dramatic backdrops of mountain and desert, though well known in Europe, have scarcely been seen in the United States. The 45 images in this exhibition, all from the permanent collection of Queens College, were curated by Barbara Lorey de Lacharriere and Amy H. Winter. The photographs document scenes both humble and majestic. Among her subjects are nomad musicians and horsemen, the midday prayers in the desert that mark the end of Ramadan, Afghan women weaving, shepherds, camel riders, fishermen on the Tigris river, and merchants plying their wares in a bazaar. Garbed in indigenous apparel, the people are colorful and captivating, yet they are frequently overwhelmed by the harsh and gorgeous landscape in which they subsist. At the same time, Schwarzenbach seems conscious of stepping into a world of political turmoil and vanishing local cultures. “They speak a Turkish dialect. Although their chiefs have been imprisoned and many of them executed, they can’t get used to the loss of their independence and to a settled life,” she says of tribesmen in southern Iran. The Sidney Mishkin Gallery is located at: Gallery hours are: © 2005 Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College
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| Sandra Kraskin (gallery) | |
