03.06.11
Opinion: Martin Middlebrook
When times get tough in hostile environments you can always rely on journalists and photojournalists to find or create a meeting point away from the frontline. While in Afghanistan, Martin Middlebrook found a Kabul café that was a place of photographic support, help and friendship.
In a back street of Kabul, a dusty, potholed, spine-crushing, empty nothing of a street, is Flower Street Café. You wouldn’t know it, of course. The first challenge is to find the street, because every street in the Afghan capital looks the same.
Travelling in Kabul reminds me of a nesting colony of Arctic terns. Everybody seems to find their way home but I still can’t figure out how. There are no road signs, no distinguishing landmarks, every street is lined with anti-blast concrete barriers, every road a throng of Hazara people pulling their wooden carts, the Eddie Stobarts of Afghanistan. But tell your driver to go to Flower Street Café and, as unerringly as those Arctic terns, he plonks you right outside it.
Except, and here is the odd bit about going to a restaurant in Kabul, you still can’t see it. No fancy neon signs or menu stands advertising tempting fare, not the happy thrum of people queueing, or the sound of music. Just a MARTIN MIDDLEBROOK metal door, an icy aperture in a 100m length of concrete wall, crowned with razor wire. Nervously you knock on the door and a peephole slides open, an Afghan security guard staring at you with an apprehension that gives up its truth in a clear and precise way: “My job is not for the faint-hearted, my life is not safe.” Keeping the international community in Afghanistan secure is the biggest source of employment, but also the most dangerous. They are more likely to be targeted by the Taliban than the international community is.
You are recognised and the door is opened into a small courtyard, where you are greeted by two Afghan security guards with Kalashnikovs and an electronic scanner. You are carrying two cameras, five lenses, a couple of flashes, batteries and chargers, and a laptop, but after nothing more than a cursory check, you are cleared to go, another door is opened and you stroll into the garden of Flower Street Café. The tension you have been feeling all day is suddenly lifted. Your nostrils spontaneously empty themselves of dust and you take on the glow of Kate Winslet – and why not? You have faced death and now you can get a decent cup of coffee and a bowl of chips as recompense. You will be surrounded by NGOs and members of the international community, fellow photographers and shady-looking people in secret squirrel conversations, in a corner under a tree, away from the bustle and relief this place provides. When I first visited Afghanistan in 2003, I landed at Kabul International Airport and doom filled my boots.
In those days the airfield was littered with the wrecks of airliners that had been shot down, blown up, or simply got it wrong on landing. Nothing wakes you from your terminal slumber more effectively than seeing death strewn across your path. I was picked up and taken to a café. As I sat there I felt like Jim Wormold in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. I had never seen so many spies. No, scrap that, I had never seen any spies, and yet this place was like a convention. Every couple of minutes two men would walk in, say something to the café owner, a door would slide open and they would disappear out of the back of the building to deal in espionage and Afghan rugs. You could tell right away who was CIA and who was MI6; the movies have these details correct, I can assure you of that. My, what an introduction to the world of photojournalism, I thought. I spent the next 10 days driving around Afghanistan shitting myself.
I don’t know where that café is now, if indeed it still exists, but Flower Street Café is where it all happens these days and it is an oasis of peace amid all the turmoil. It has a garden, tables placed under shaded trees and traditional seating areas under a canopy. Inside are two main rooms, manned to the gunwales with consultants on laptops tapping like crazy, keen to get that report to ISAF or UNDP, or whoever. It has Wi-Fi, which is hard to put a price on in Afghanistan. Internet connection is so slow and sporadic in Kabul that your expectations are managed for you. You sit down, order a mango smoothie, fire up the laptop and discover you have 30 emails. Two hours later you are still downloading them, but you will get there, and by the following Thursday you have managed to reply to half of them. The Afghan Government frequently disconnects the internet when it is concerned about specific threats and in the first week of my visit in June it was turned off a couple of times every day. It drives you crazy.
You go to Flower Street Café for the sanctuary it provides, the burger and chips you can order, and the Wi-Fi you urgently need, but mostly you go because it is full of like-minded people with whom you can share experiences, security information and creative ideas. I needed to visit Jalalabad [about 100 miles east of Kabul] as part of my work this summer and I was receiving constantly conflicting security advice from the Afghan Government, the US State Department and my main Afghan contact. Ostensibly I work alone without protection, so solid security advice is crucial. In the end it is the first-hand advice of fellow photographers that I always trust the most. They have been there, seen it, done it. So when the information became increasingly confusing I headed off to Flower Street Café to bend the ear of people I trust.
I would meet a Canadian photographer called David Belluz there. He was in Kabul waiting to get his papers approved for an ‘embed’ with the US marines in Helmand province. He had been based out of Kabul for about a year and was the perfect contact and a top man to boot. He had ordered a Nikon D3 that was being shipped in and he was like a kid in a sweet shop the day it arrived. He shot down my Canon EOS 5D MkII with a frame rate of 11fps and a buffer that was staggering, and I sulked that life wasn’t always great as a Canon user, although, of course, my 21MP was substantially better than his girl’s blouse 12MP.
So to put it to the test, we left our coffee, jumped into my car and headed off to Nadir Shah Hill, a plateau that overlooks Kabul and provides the final resting place for the last King of Afghanistan. On windy days it is the perfect place for kite flying and Afghan horsemen test their skills on the flat, dusty arena next to the royal mausoleum. On the day we turned up, an impromptu game of the national sport of buzkashi broke out among the horse riders and we decided to see who was the better photographer, whose camera was better and who would get the shot of the day. As it turned out we were both crap. As David clicked away at 11fps I concentrated on not getting killed by the barrelling stallions and dealing with increasingly aggressive Afghan men.
What started out as a fun shoot, testing our kit and our immature macho bravado, eventually turned nasty, as incidents often do in Afghanistan. Initially the riders were happy to play and let us shoot, but after a while things went the way they frequently do, and money was demanded. Lots of it, from most of the riders. In these situations you are ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’. If you don’t pay, things become threatening, if you do pay you have to pay everyone, otherwise those who haven’t received any yet will pester you relentlessly. If you do pay everyone, then they will come back for more, and more. You may not like it, but the average annual income is $500, so they can hardly be blamed, we would do the same.
The main aggressor then claimed that his horse had gone lame due to the show they had put on for us, and a substantial fee was demanded. Of course I declined, so he started ramming me with his horse, making it rear, and crushing me against a boundary wall. My knowledge of Dari, one of Afghanistan’s official languages, is sketchy at best (I can say ‘thank you’ and that’s all), so I shouted to David for support and between us we got back to my car and escaped the menace. Many days have moments like this, that start pleasantly but turn ugly, and it’s at such times when Flower Street Café comes into its own. I won’t say that you are scared, but it’s often stressful, and the cumulative effect of this stress is not apparent until you walk through the metal door of the café, put down your kit and order a coffee. It’s then that you couldn’t be happier to be in the company of people you would call your own, with the food and drink you would call your own, speaking your own language, emailing friends and reading the BBC news.
This is not a racist observation, it’s a truth. When I am working, I spend the great majority of my time with Afghans. They are truly wonderful people, unfailingly helpful and polite, but understandably a lot don’t want you there, for them the occupation is a crime. On one day alone in Kabul the police stopped me more than 20 times. You are followed and pushed around wherever you go, most smile cheerfully at you, but others make it clear you are not welcome. I have been shoved over, had punches thrown at me, been followed on a number of occasions, and narrowly avoided being blown up. The dust storms whip up in the afternoon and the traffic is gridlocked. It grinds you down. By 5pm on most days you are beat and there is only one thing to do – get a mango smoothie at Flower Street Café.
Every photographer you meet feels the same. They love it for the opportunity it provides, for the experiences it throws up, but they can’t wait to get to the airport and go somewhere else. My experience of meeting fellow commercial photographers in the UK is they are very protective of their contacts, ideas and techniques; it’s not a United States of Photography, it’s every man for himself. The antithesis seems true with photojournalists. Everyone is in it together. Need a driver in Herat and they will know one; a hotel in Bamiyan, a quick call is made; want to borrow a lens, it’s offered in an instant. It’s a collective sense of being part of something, part of a community, which whisks you along on a tide of shared experiences and energy when you are tired, fed up and ready to throw in the towel.
This collective camaraderie couldn’t exist without a physical place for everyone to meet, and in the world of internet and texts, nothing beats sitting round a table and bitching about what a tough day you have had. On more occasions than I can remember, Flower Street Café has been my emotional saviour. When I have wanted to throw my toys out the pram and down tools, a peaceful hour drinking coffee and eating chips, earwigging others’ conversations and chatting with colleagues, means I have suddenly found my mojo again – what an island of civilisation in an ocean of stress it is.
www.martinmiddlebrook.com
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