5,000 Years, One Kind of Bread
Afghanistan, a civilisation of 5,000 uninterrupted years, has just one kind of bread - the ‘Ghani’. If you go to any supermarket in Europe you can choose from perhaps thirty different kinds of bread, fashioned into every conceivable form and texture and taste. A few years back I had dinner at the US Embassy in Kabul with a representative of the US State Department, and he asked me plainly where US policy in Afghanistan had gone so terribly wrong. I answered equally plainly that they had failed to ask the Afghan people what they wanted - I said ‘a country with just one kind of bread is not for changing’.
In 2010, to coincide with the Kabul International Conference, the US Geological Survey concluded it’s research into untapped mineral wealth and announced that Afghanistan was home to over a trillion dollars of possibility.
I was always struck when I travelled the country how the land seemed to glow with the colours of elements long ago trapped inside the rocks. You could palpably see that wealth everywhere you looked, but no one in 5,000 years had thought to investigate and extract it. Because a country that has just one kind of bread...
I tried whenever I could to chronicle this extensive potential wealth, in ‘snapped’ landscape images, and this portfolio is the fruit of that intent.
