2012 Photo Contest, Portraits, 3rd prize

Burke + Norfolk

Photographer

Simon Norfolk

01 January, 1878

Soldiers of the 72nd Regiment (Duke of Albany’s Own Highlanders). A heliograph team is equipped with early Aldis lamps and signaling mirrors, used for mountain-top to mountain-top communication back to India.

About the photographer

Simon Norfolk

Simon has produced four major books: For Most Of It I Have No Words (1998) about the landscapes of genocide, Afghanistan: Chronotopia (2002), 'Bleed' (2005) about the war in Bosn...

Background story

Afghanistan

Soldiers of the 72nd Regiment (Duke of Albany’s Own Highlanders). A heliograph team is equipped with early Aldis lamps and signaling mirrors, used for mountain-top to mountain-top communication back to India. While working in Afghanistan during 2010 and 2011, Simon Norfolk had the idea of trying to photograph groups he felt might have been interesting to the 19th-century photographer John Burke, were he there today. Burke was in Afghanistan during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, from 1878 to 1880. The photos are part of a larger project, in which Norfolk examines the role of the British in Afghanistan in the 19th and 21st centuries.

This image is collected in