Wichita artist Michael Pointer sent the following email along with a handful of photos from inside the The Afghanistan Dental Relief Project compound in Kabul:
(click lower right icon for full screen)
Hello to you all,
I hope this finds you all well and happy. I am. Thursday morning, the twelfth I think, the alarm clock came in the form of a big explosion nearby. I don’t know much about it except that I wasn’t ready to get up yet. It wasn’t reported on the news here probably to keep the Taliban from benefiting from the publicity. Life goes on.
I was hoping to get this off to you all on Friday the 13th but the internet didn’t cooperate and when it started to we would lose our electricity. I intended to do a series of still life images I’ve been making but I got sidetracked. Instead all of these photos are from inside the compound or just outside the front door. With security in the city being rather poor I have stayed close to home. These will give you an interior sense of being in the compound as well as a good representation of what it feels like to be stuck in here. The workmen digging a drainage ditch down our street provided some good opportunities to photograph old men in turbans. You can’t have too many photos of that. I also continue to be fascinated by the anthropomorphic qualities of the giant sunflowers here and it’s a good thing too as they tore out all of the garden yesterday….
Well that’s about all I have to report right now. The Afghan government is very destabilized and apparently there will be some violence around Karzai’s inauguration ceremony.
I think I’ll go.
Take it easy and love to you all,
Michael