Fahim Starting School, Kabul, Afghanistan Print

I took this photograph at the Daiqiqi Balqi School in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2014. It's a neighborhood school in an area of town people sometimes call Old Kabul, since that's where you're most likely to find houses and streets the way they were back before the 1970s. At the time I was in the final year of filming for my feature documentary, Angels Are Made Of Light (available on iTunes!), and I was trying to take an image to use for the movie poster. The film takes place at the school and all the people in the film are either students or staff there, so I wanted an image that would send that message but also be striking enough to stay in the mind of the viewer and make them want to see the film. I usually do all my street photography in horizontal format with a 24mm lens, but for this image I chose a 100mm lens to work with the vertical format and to be closer, graphically, to the way we are conditioned to think a movie poster looks. It was my stroke of good fortune that on that day - in the beginning of the school year, which happens in the springtime in Afghanistan - Fahim's mother was dropping him off at the schoolhouse door for the first time. Fahim was six, and appeared to have never before been left in a place full of strangers. He was, for a time, tearfully terrified and begged his mother not to go. I distracted him by showing him pictures on the screen of my digital camera, and then, as he lined up in the first of many morning assemblies, I made his portrait. A couple weeks later I found him in the neighborhood and gave him a copy of his picture. I don't think he remembered me having taken it - he was probably thinking about his mother's departure at the time, then followed by his first weeks at school. At six years old, so much of what happens seems like a dream. I look forward to visiting Kabul again and giving Fahim a full-sized poster. This picture did indeed become the image we used when Hamid Rahmanian designed the movie poster for Angels Are Made Of Light. I like the image because of Fahim's direct stare, and his obvious strong emotion - one can sense the edge of tears welling up. Also, the arrangement of the other boys faces in relation to Fahim's is quite satisfying - it took several attempts to find a moment where the background had fallen into an evocative alignment to match Fahim's intensity. For the Angels Are Made Of Light movie poster image, I hoped to find an iconic moment that draws the viewer in and promises an entryway to some new world of experience. This picture does exactly that, and is also - in my estimation - a strong image in its own right, as a character study, as a moment we have probably all lived through in our youth, and as a documentary photograph about education in Afghanistan. So what happened to the film? The documentary went on to premiere at Telluride Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival, NYFF, IDFA and so on - and then opened theatrically at Film Forum in New York City. Angels Are Made Of Light received excellent reviews in the Los Angeles Times, Variety, and the New York Times, where it was Critic's Pick of the week. It is available for rent or purchase via iTunes. The idea behind all of my work in Afghanistan and the other West Asian countries where I have lived over the past decades has been to express to a broader audience the beautiful humanity that I found all around me. The people in these countries have suffered greatly through various wars and conflicts, but their character remains stronger than ever. My films and photographs are love poems to my friends and all the people I met and worked with, who collaborated with me to immortalize them in stills and in motion. A portion of my income goes to support people I have filmed and worked with in the past, their education and the upkeep of their families. For the time being I am offering this image only as an open edition print through SaatchiArt.

Print:Giclee on Fine Art Paper

Size:8 W x 12 H x 0.1 D in

Size with Frame:13.25 W x 17.25 H x 1.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.