Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Zalmaï left the country after the Soviet invasion in 1980. He traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he became a Swiss citizen. Following his passion for Photography, which he discovered very early in life, Zalmaï pursued combined studies at both the school of Photography of Lausanne and at the Professional Photography Training Center of Yverdon. In 1989, he began to work as a freelance photographer, traveling around the world from Indonesia to Egypt, from Cuba to the Central African Republic, and eventually returned to Afghanistan, where he continues documenting the ongoing war and plight of the Afghan people. Zalmaï has spent most of his life between Europe, the United States and Asia. His work has been published in several magazines and newspapers including the New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Le Temps, Newsweek, and La Repubblica, while he has worked for a number of International Organizations and NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, International Committee of the Red Cross, UN Office On Drug and Crime, and the UN Refugee Agency. His work has been exhibited around the world at museums, galleries, universities and cultural centers and has earned him several international awards, the latest being the Visa D'Or and a grant by Getty Images.
Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Zalmaï left the country after the Soviet invasion in 1980. He traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland, where he became a Swiss citizen. Following his passion for Photography, which he discovered very early in life, Zalmaï pursued combined studies at both the school of Photography of Lausanne and at the Professional Photography Training Center of Yverdon. In 1989, he began to work as a freelance photographer, traveling around the world from Indonesia to Egypt, from Cuba to the Central African Republic, and eventually returned to Afghanistan, where he continues documenting the ongoing war and plight of the Afghan people.
Zalmaï has spent most of his life between Europe, the United States and Asia. His work has been published in several magazines and newspapers including the New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Le Temps, Newsweek, and La Repubblica, while he has worked for a number of International Organizations and NGOs, including Human Rights Watch, International Committee of the Red Cross, UN Office On Drug and Crime, and the UN Refugee Agency. His work has been exhibited around the world at museums, galleries, universities and cultural centers and has earned him several international awards, the latest being the Visa D'Or and a grant by Getty Images.
World tour of Return, Afghanistan The Geneva exhibition served as a launching pad for two world tours with the collaboration of UNHCR, the Aperture Foundation in New York and the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, as well as the support of the Center of Competence for Cultural Foreign Policy of the Swiss Federal........BFM Exhibition Geneva ,May 2004Department of Foreign Affairs. Fedex Express will provide worldwide free transport for the exhibition. The world tours are taking place over a period of at least two years.The European and Asian tour produced by UNHCR in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation and coordinated by the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, started in Kabul, Afghanistan, the first of its kind to be presented in the country after the fall of the Taliban. From there it returned to Geneva to be shown at the Palais des Nations (25 September - 15 October). The exhibition next travels to Australia, Japan and other European countries.The U.S. tour, produced and coordinated by the Aperture Foundation with the support of UNHCR, started in Washington D.C. at the National Geographic Explorer Hall and also at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on World Refugee Day, 20 June 2004. The exhibition will then proceed to Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other American cities.See also UNHCR web site Amani school, Kabul july 2004The National Geographic Museum ,Washington DC, USA June 2004
World tour of Return, Afghanistan
The Geneva exhibition served as a launching pad for two world tours with the collaboration of UNHCR, the Aperture Foundation in New York and the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, as well as the support of the Center of Competence for Cultural Foreign Policy of the Swiss Federal
........
BFM Exhibition Geneva ,May 2004
Department of Foreign Affairs. Fedex Express will provide worldwide free transport for the exhibition. The world tours are taking place over a period of at least two years.
The European and Asian tour produced by UNHCR in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation and coordinated by the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, started in Kabul, Afghanistan, the first of its kind to be presented in the country after the fall of the Taliban. From there it returned to Geneva to be shown at the Palais des Nations (25 September - 15 October). The exhibition next travels to Australia, Japan and other European countries.
The U.S. tour, produced and coordinated by the Aperture Foundation with the support of UNHCR, started in Washington D.C. at the National Geographic Explorer Hall and also at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on World Refugee Day, 20 June 2004. The exhibition will then proceed to Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other American cities.
See also UNHCR web site
Amani school, Kabul july 2004
The National Geographic Museum ,Washington DC, USA June 2004
Return , Afghanistan -APERTURE
2004
For more than a quarter of a century, Afghanistan has been ravaged by war, drought, and famine. In this magnificent volume, Afghan-born photographer Zalmaï returns home after twenty-three years in exile to rediscover his homeland at a crucial moment of transition. Working in rich color, and frequently using a panoramic format that embraces the vastness of the sky and sand, Zalmaï immerses us in the ravaged landscape and the bustle of reconstruction. My project tries to capture the resilience of a people who have rarely known peace, their optimism in the face of overwhelming odds and the very real worry that the country remains on a knife-edge and could easily slip back into a nightmare from which it is still trying to escape.
ECLIPSE Umbrage 2002
Zalmaïs photographs capture the slow, distressing drift of exile and dispossession: spectral figures against a stormy sky, a sheared row of peaks framing a figure like a sacred relic, horizons of men, both of this world and of some timeless land. This is a documentation of a journey through ambiguous territoriesfrom Cuba to India, Mali to the Philippines, Indonesia to Egypt, and a return to Zalmaïs native Afghanistana search for place when ones own land has been destroyed.
The changing interplay of composition, light, and faces infuse the photographs of Zalmaï in this book, which speaks of transformation and disenfranchisement not just of place but of spirit. Most of all, his work is about the fragility of presence.These are photographs that have been shaped over centuries by ideas carried in mens soulsnot places given by the gods in their placid beauty. Instead, the interiors of these photographs are tangled and jagged, meandering and menacing, of this earth even as they reach to the sky. In the aggregate, they sketch a fragmented story of dispossession, of a voyage of the spirit, of the complex emotions of return. Paris-based Afghan novelist, Atiq Rahimi, contributes an original preface, The Memory of the Mirror. In Eclipse, these two voices offer insight into an Afghanistan lost, but not forgotten, and of the enduring legacy of exile.
An exhibition of the work opened at the Musée dElysée, Lausanne in Fall 2002, before traveling internationally. Daniel Girardin, Curator of the Museé dElyseé, curated the European exhibition and contributes an essay to this volume.
