For a time, portrait photographers in Kabul could eke out a living using the box camera. In the 1950s, a kamra-e-faoree cost 500 Afghanis (roughly $6 in today’s U.S. Dealing with their idiosyncrasies-from light leakage to rickety tripod legs-was part of the photographer’s job. And no one else could make them like him.” Every box camera Abdul made was subtly different. (To supplement his income, Abdul sold some cameras in nearby cities too.) Baratali remembers Abdul making most of the box cameras in Kabul, including the one he gave to Baratali. The most prominent of these carpenters was Ali Abdul. Lynzy BillingĪfghan box cameras were built by local carpenters, who made the structure sturdy enough to withstand Afghanistan’s extreme temperatures and survive Kabul’s narrow streets, no matter how precarious the transportation. Through an eyehole, the photographer can follow the development process in real time. “If someone had something wrong with their eye in the photograph, we would put a little bit of sulphate on the pupil to fix it,” Baratali says with a wink. To balance out an image’s contrast, box-camera photographers would add a red tint to the negative. We would make a fixer solution at home using Metol, sodium carbonate, and sodium sulphate … and a developer solution from Pakistan used bromide.” The paper would come mainly from Japan, Germany, or Russia. In the past, says Baratali, “you would buy boxes of a hundred large photographic papers that you could cut into smaller pieces. To develop a negative by hand, the operator inserts an arm through a sleeve of cloth to access the camera’s interior. With the aid of an eyehole on top, the photographer can follow the development process in real time. The photographic process is completely analog, using only natural light to expose the paper. Only natural light is needed to expose the paper. Chemicals and paper are stored within, in small trays. The lenses are shutterless, so the camera utilizes an internal focusing system: A rod on the back of the box works with an adjustable sanded-glass plate inside. War in a box paper tanks icon manual#The kamra-e-faoree is a self-contained device-a manual camera and darkroom in one. In the dappled afternoon light of a summer afternoon, Baratali is standing in the courtyard of his house in the Afghan capital, explaining the camera’s odd technology. Its rise and ubiquity, along with other developments in Afghanistan-including legislative changes, dying knowledge of the art, and lack of access to the necessary materials-may do what wars, invasions, and fundamentalist tyranny have failed to accomplish: push the kamra-e-faoree to extinction in its homeland. Lynzy Billingīut now the Afghan box camera is facing a foe it may not be able to overcome: digital photography. Kabul photographer Abdul Haq Baratali, 69, has been making portraits with his box camera for nearly half a century. Over the years, as its popularity waxed and waned, it survived the Soviet invasion in 1979, the civil war that followed it, Taliban rule in the 1990s, and successive conflicts in the years following the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Used in Afghanistan for decades, the unique handmade device-like Baratali himself-has lived through a lot. “He gave me a kamra-e-faoree of his to practice on.” “Ali used to come to my sister’s husband’s shop, and he saw my interest in photography,” says Baratali. A prominent carpenter in Kabul named Ali Ahmad gifted him a curious boxy camera-a kamra-e-faoree (“instant camera” in Dari). Back then he had to use whatever was on hand-usually cameras from the Soviet Union, which he borrowed from his sister’s husband.Ī few years later, however, things changed. The 69-year-old photographer is sitting on the porch outside his cluttered one-story house on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, remembering when he was six years old. So I learned photography to earn for my family.” My father had just died, there was no one to feed us, and I was unable to go to school. “I had to stand on a chair in order to operate it. His hands trace the contours of a wooden box that sits before him, brightly colored and decorated with patterned vinyl fabric. When I first started photographing, I couldn’t even reach the camera,” says Abdul Haq Baratali.
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