Fatimah Hossaini, Afghan photographer: “I used to have problems with the fathers, brothers or husbands of the women I wanted to photograph”

Fatimah Hossaini (Tehran, 31 years old) has been chased down the street by men who have insulted her, threatened her and have sometimes managed to prevent her from continuing to do her job: portraying “the beauty of women” in Afghanistan.

“The only problem is that I was a woman with a camera on the streets of Kabul,” says this Afghan artist born in Iran, who, despite that harassment, remembers that stage, the one that took place in the years before the return of the Taliban. to the country—in August 2021—as one of the “greatest freedom” periods of his life.

But to understand why Hossaini has focused her photographic project on capturing the attractiveness of Afghan women, a work on which she continues to focus during her current exile in Paris, it is necessary to turn to the “identity crisis” that she claims she has experienced for a long time. part of her life, a victim of triple discrimination: as an Afghan in Iran, as a woman in countries with strong patriarchal domination and as a member of the Hazara minority (a group of Shia Muslims in Afghanistan).

“Migration, identity and gender are the three most important themes of my work,” she describes during an interview in Barcelona, ​​within the framework of the Human Rights Defender Cities project, organized in several Catalan municipalities at the end of last year.

The problem is that I was a woman with a camera on the streets of Kabul

An Afghan woman dressed in traditional clothing poses while drinking tea.

Photo from the 'Pearl in the Oyster' collection.Fatimah Hossaini

Granddaughter of Afghans who fled the country in the 1980s during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the artist had “a very Iranianized life.”

“I was completely integrated into Iranian society because I was born there, but you can only be Iranian if your parents are, so three generations after my family's migration, I was still Afghan,” she says.

And although she claims that she owes “her artistic career” to her Iranian teachers and the “influence of Persian culture,” she suffered “discrimination from school to university.”

Fatimah Hossaini, in the center of Barcelona last October.massiliano minocri

“My life would have been easier if I had had Iranian nationality, but assuming that the identity crisis was a part of my life, I tried to discover Afghanistan, especially to women,” she notes.

The first Afghan women she met were her mother and her sisters.

However, when she tried to find out what the others were like, she only found “the cliché of Afghan women portrayed in the media as victims, forced to cover themselves with a burqa.”

The Taliban have thrown women into a gender apartheid that makes their lives impossible

The search for the Afghan feminine essence was one of the reasons why she returned to Afghanistan in 2018, where she worked as a Professor of Photography at the University of Kabul.

“I have found many interesting, different and very valuable stories from Afghan women that made me reflect on why we are always presented as a symbol of the victims of the world,” she recalls.

She is not unaware that the restrictions “of the patriarchal society” of Afghanistan, even before the return of the Taliban, were many.

“I used to have problems with the parents, brothers or husbands of the women I wanted to photograph and that's why I used to turn to artists, musicians and actresses, who were familiar with the camera and let me publish their photos.”

And above all, they allowed her to show “the beauty hidden in the midst of war and misery, that femininity and that halo of hope that still exists somewhere.”

An Afghan artist poses for Fatimah Hossaini, in an image from the 'Pearl in the Oyster' collection.Fatimah Hossaini

“In Iran, the Government controls everything, and forces you to cover yourself, if you are a woman;

But in Kabul, at that time, there were no police officers to tell you what to do or what not to do,” Hossaini said.

“I wore the hijab on the street for my own safety, but not in classes, where I also had more female students than male students,” he explains.

Because before the return of the Taliban regime, he remembers with some nostalgia, “there was a new lifestyle in Kabul, thanks in part to the fact that the new generations – especially those of us who came from the diaspora – returned and tried to build something and bring a little freedom and many new ideas.”

Therefore, despite being a woman in a sexist and Hazara society, a traditional target of the Taliban, “it was fantastic” to be in her country of origin and feel “so free,” she says.

“We had women in all sectors, women doctors, women professors and women business owners and leaders of important institutions.”

An Afghan woman poses in a traditional dress.Fatimah Hossaini

Last days in Kabul

However, the return of the Taliban threw women “into a

gender

apartheid that makes their lives impossible.”

Even today it is difficult for him to believe that that “horror” happened.

On August 14, 2021, just one day before the fall of Kabul, she denied in an interview on CNN the possibility of the Taliban regaining power: “I said very confidently and very bravely that the new generation of Afghans would never allow that a terrorist group returned to Afghanistan, and that the international community was also there to protect us.”

Reality hit her the next morning, when she saw from her balcony “Taliban fighters running through the streets with their flags and their motorcycles.”

“I stayed at home for two days without eating, shocked and exhausted, until some friends came and we went to the airport together,” she says.

She was able to escape three days later because in the middle of the chaos in the military zone at the Kabul airport, three French soldiers heard her shout that she was an artist.

“They took me to a shelter and I flew to Paris,” she continues.

“For me it was incredible that this happened in front of the eyes of the international community… I saw how everyone left, how my friends fled to other countries, how Afghanistan lost all its human talent, how no one resisted after four decades of wars and conflicts, how all our dreams and hopes were destroyed.”

Afghan Aqila Rezaee, in a photograph taken in Paris.Fatimah Hossaini

And how Paris meant she was reliving the feeling she had experienced in Iran of feeling like a foreigner.

“It is a beautiful and inspiring city to be an artist, but it is not my home,” she says.

However, she did not give up her efforts to portray Afghan women, she looked for those who had taken refuge in France and found, once again, her hidden beauty.

“I even photographed them with Afghan clothes and accessories, but on this occasion as expatriates, far from her house.”

That beauty, he reflects, also emerges in the midst of adversity because “living in exile requires courage and resilience, it forces you to live disconnected from your origins and integrate into a new language, with a new people and a new culture, while you deal with at the same time with the traumas that you carry.”

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