At the Crossroads: Qandahar in Images and Empires

Director's Statement

In 2013, the Getty Research Institute acquired an album of nineteenth-century photographs considered to represent the earliest examples taken of Qandahar.

Today, the album is housed in our library’s Special Collections, where it is part of a vast corpus of rare, and often unique, documentary and historic materials assembled as part of our mission to further knowledge and advance the understanding of the visual arts.

The exhibition At the Crossroads: Qandahar in Images and Empires presents photographs from the album, contextualized with explanatory descriptions and related essays that together provide insight into the city’s former urban fabric and historic events now obscured by time. Like many of the earliest photographs taken around the globe after the invention of photography in 1839, these images of Qandahar reflect an imperialist viewpoint that often fails to capture the full social dynamics and cultural heritage of the region.

However, in mounting this exhibition, our hope is that it will encourage better understanding of Afghanistan’s rich heritage and facilitate critical study of the region, its people and their traditions, perhaps yielding new perspective about the period.

Indeed, we at the Getty Research Institute hope that At the Crossroads: Qandahar in Images and Empires might be remembered as the first of many future exchanges and scholarly endeavors with the people of Afghanistan.

Mary E. Miller, Director, Getty Research Institute

J. Paul Getty Trust. At the Crossroads: Qandahar in Images and Empires. Getty Publications, Los Angeles: 2022.

J. Paul Getty Trust