Thomas Dworzak's Taliban Portraits at Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

While covering the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak (b. 1972, Germany) came across a handful of photo studios in Kandahar which despite the Taliban’s ban on photography had been authorised to remain open for the purpose of taking identity photos. Complicating the conventional image of the hypermasculine soldier, the colour portraits Dworzak found in the back rooms of these studios depict Taliban fighters variously posing in front of scenic backdrops, holding hands, using guns or flowers as props or enveloped in a halo of vibrant colours, their eyes heavily made up with black kohl. These stylised photographs directly contradict the public image of the soldier in this overwhelmingly male-dominated patriarchal society.

What does it mean to be a man today? The Barbican's Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.