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| © 2007 Lana Šlezić, Dubai |
| Afghan women shop for clothes in Mazar-e-Sharif. Click photo for more images. |
powerHouse; 132 pages; 84 color photographs; $35
Lana Šlezić, a freelance photographer with Croatian roots who was born in Toronto and lives in Istanbul, first arrived in Afghanistan in 2004 to shoot a feature on the Canadian military for Canadian Geographic. "I believed that since the ousting of the Taliban in 2001, girls were back at school, women had discarded the burka, and in general, the environment was less oppressive," she writes in her introduction to the book.
When Šlezić discovered a reality that was just the opposite, she extended her initial six-week assignment into a two-year project, which she funded by freelancing and by selling prints to Kabul's expatriate community. With the help of her dedicated translator and friend, Farzana, she gained impressive access to the cloistered world of Afghan women, and the images she came back with tell the true story of their existence: girls married off at the age of 4 and physically abused throughout their childhood, 16-year-olds forced into marriages that are little better than slavery, educated women murdered by their in-laws for not doing as they were told. But they also remind us of the incredible resilience of the women who survive.
Forsaken is the first monograph from Šlezić, whose work has appeared in National Geographic, Mother Jones, and the British Journal of Photography. Not surprisingly, she says that her feelings about the book still "sit just below the skin."
-Miki Johnson
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