This is one of Visa pour l’Image’s most interesting exhibitions this year.
Its title: In the Shadow of White Flags.
The photographer: Sandra Calligaro.
She accompanied her photos with this text.
JJN
On August 15, 2021, thanks to the American withdrawal, the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, twenty years after being driven out. Upon their return, a leaden pall fell over the country. The media were muzzled, girls were excluded from secondary education, and music was banned. Women were once again ordered to cover themselves from head to toe: in the cities, the veils of long black abayas billowed alongside electric blue chadris. Excluded from most workplaces and social gatherings, they were erased from the public sphere, locked away in their homes. This exclusion is all the more painful, unspeakable, for city dwellers whom the West had encouraged to emancipate themselves and see the world differently.
Faced with the gradual establishment of theocracy, I sought to document the tragic daily lives of women: their confinement, but also their resilience. I wanted to paint a portrait of a constrained society, adapting as best it can and trying to resist increasingly restrictive decrees.
Driven indoors, women nevertheless find ways to continue living despite the restrictions. Hidden from view, clandestine schools welcome thousands of young students. Although their presence in public spaces is limited, women are still allowed to work in a few sectors such as healthcare, art, or crafts—gray areas into which they are quickly plunging.
Through gestures that may seem trivial to us but which, in this context, reveal true courage, young girls continue to learn—in living rooms, in basements, or via online programs. They continue to groom themselves in beauty salons operating behind closed doors. And since public education is forbidden to them beyond the 5th grade, they turn to art classes—in these workshops, they sometimes rub shoulders with young men. They defy Taliban law, but not only that: they also oppose a deeply patriarchal and conservative society, where oppression is not limited to religion.
I present Afghanistan in half-tone , suspended between hope and melancholy. My photographic approach is intended to be intimate. I pay particular attention to interiors the last spaces of freedom for women. As a woman myself, I can cross the parda, the symbolic and physical curtain that separates the sexes, to access these enclosed spaces where female life subsists. Conversely, in photographs taken outside, in spaces reserved for men, the eye searches for women and struggles to find them: they have become a detail in the image.
Implicitly, I also evoke those who, during these twenty years of international intervention, grew up far from the cities, in rural areas where aid did not reach. The young Taliban fighters are mostly from this youth who remained on the margins of progress. Lacking schooling, they attended madrasas, the Quranic schools, and from adolescence onwards, were recruited for jihad. Did they even have a choice over their destiny?
Two worlds, two Afghanistans, crushed by more than forty years of deadly conflict, collide: the aborted dreams of some, the vanished hopes, coexist with the return to light of others. It is this complexity inherent to war, and which fractures societies that my work attempts to embrace.
Sandra Calligaro. June 2025
With the support of documentary photography from the Centre National des arts plastiques and Brouillon d’un rêve from the Scam and the La Culture avec la Copie Privée program.
Sandra Calligaro : Afghanistan : In the shadow of the white flags
August 30 to September 14, 2025
Hôtel Pams
18 rue Émile Zola
66000 Perpignan
https://www.visapourlimage.com/en/festival/exhibitions/afghanistan-a-l-ombre-des-drapeaux-blancs
Sandra Calligaro is also invited to the round table discussion “Telling the Changing World – New Perspectives” with William Keo, Aliocha Boi, and Chloé Goualc’h, which will be held on Thursday, September 18, 2025, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., in conjunction with the exhibition Marie-Laure de Decker — L’image comme engagement.
Reservations are recommended (but not required): Raconter le monde en mutation – nouveaux regards : table ronde avec Sandra Calligaro, William Keo, Aliocha Boi et Chloé Goualc’h – La MEP
Sandra Calligaro is the 2024 winner of the Françoise Demulder Prize.
