In this birthday party portrait, teenage girls celebrate in secret in Afghanistan

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — The photograph could have been taken at any birthday party: three girls in dresses standing side-by-side in a living room, balloons and streamers strung up around an entryway. The subjects could be friends or sisters, each with long brown hair that falls past their waists.

But with their faces turned away from the camera, there’s a reason for their anonymity, and a deeper significance to their unveiled hair. The girls live in Kabul under the increasingly watchful eyes of the Taliban, who returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021 when US troops abruptly withdrew from the country. After initially pledging to honor women’s rights, the Taliban has nearly erased women from public life, sending girls behind closed doors, even to mark occasions such as these.

Taken earlier this year by Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Kiana Hayeri, the portrait is just one of many images from a six-month body of work showing the lives of Afghan women as the Taliban has continually stripped them of their basic rights, including requiring veiling in public and banning the sounds of their voices, as well as prohibiting them from secondary school, much of the workforce and many social spaces. Working with French researcher Mélissa Cornet, the pair’s collaborative report “No Woman’s Land” received funding from the Carmignac Photojournalism Award and is exhibiting in Paris this month as a mix of photographs, videos and collaborative art with Afghan girls.

Hayeri and Cornet traveled to seven provinces and met with more than 100 women during the first half of the year for the report. They met in 2018 in Kabul and have both lived in Afghanistan on and off for several years. Hayeri was present during the chaos of the US military’s withdrawal, and Cornet returned soon after.

“Week by week, there was a different fear,” Hayeri recalled to CNN, beginning with her immediate safety amid the shock of the country’s fall. “As we saw how everyday things changed and events unfolded, the fear became about what was going to happen to society, and what was going to happen to Afghan women.”

A longer look

The pair wanted to present a nuanced view of Afghan women’s lives, they explained in a video interview. Rather than a one-dimensional view of oppression, “No Woman’s Land” is meant to be a longer, deeper look at the “immaterial losses” of a generation of women who have lost hope in the future, Cornet said. As their work shows, the ramifications have been complex.

“Without minimizing how terrible the situation is… there’s a lot of layers,” Cornet explained. “It’s a very heterogeneous country. So if you go to the south, to the north, to the center, to the west, you see completely different realities.”

Though Afghan society is “deeply” patriarchal, Cornet added, allowing the Taliban to “outsource control of women” to men in their families, the urban and rural divide can be wide. Many women never experienced the progress in equality made in city centers over the past two decades, they explained.

Cornet noted the Taliban’s rule isn’t homogenous either, with some parts of the group turning a blind eye to underground schools that still educate girls past the sixth grade, which they documented as part of the series. The tensions in ideology among the Taliban go all the way to the top, according to a recent report by The New York Times, with the infamous militant and now acting interior minister Sirajuddin Haqqani allegedly privately lobbying for young women’s education in opposition to the decisions of the hardline head of state, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada.

Over the course of the six months, Hayeri and Cornet repeatedly photographed the teenage girls in the birthday party portrait, as well as their extended circle of friends. They met them in their homes, and at other private gatherings for celebrations like birthdays and weddings.

“In this particular case, it was a 16-year-old’s birthday party for one of the girls,” Cornet said. “She’s not in the photo, but she had a big black and gold, super dramatic dress that her mom had made for her.”

Though music and dancing in public have been outlawed, the girls at the party played music from their phones on a large speaker and danced together, they said, posing for images posted to their social media accounts. They’ve seen some of the girls continuing to share images of themselves without hair coverings, taking a risk each time they do. In their project, Hayeri and Cornet kept returning to small beauty rituals often taken for granted, like the girls braiding each other’s hair or applying makeup or henna, in a climate where those acts have become highly charged with meaning.

“Resistance for Afghan women cannot mean to go on the street and protest, to be outspoken,” Hayeri said. Resistance instead is “existing, because the Taliban is trying to wipe them from public (life) and…strip them from their identities.”

Though the pair documented many difficult facets of Afghan society, from mothers struggling to feed their children to families affected by the suicides of girls taken out of school, they also looked for “pockets of joy,” Hayeri said. “It’s important to think about joy as a form of resistance. “It’s something that both Melissa and I have been obsessing over — when there is no hope, there is absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel, how do you go on about your lives?”

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