Two young Afghan cousins have produced a striking series of black-and-white photographs that blend autobiography, fantasy and political protest. Working under the pseudonyms Mahnaz Ebrahimi (born 2000) and Somayeh Ebrahimi (born 2001), they asked to remain anonymous out of fear of Taliban reprisals. The cousins live in a remote mountain farming village; they and their families are Hazara Shia who once wove carpets in Kabul and fled after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021.
The images, shot mostly on cellphones beginning around 2022, pair austere rural settings with theatrical poses and poetic captions written by the cousins. Madrid-based curator Edith Arance discovered the work on Instagram, began corresponding with the photographers in Farsi and helped bring the project to a wider audience. Arance presented the series at her Galería Sura in Madrid in November 2024 and translated the short poems that accompany many of the images. Selections from the project were shown at the Photoville Festival in Brooklyn, New York, through May 30.
Arance describes the photographs as auto-fiction: rooted in the artists’ lived experience but infused with imagined gestures and symbolic staging. She also notes a kinship with magic realism, because the makers use everyday elements — light and shadow, trees and leaves, butterflies — as metaphors for longing, resistance and small acts of renewal.
A few photographs illustrate the project’s tone and themes. In It Will Not Stand in My Way, a woman shrouded in a dark burka sits astride a bicycle, hands on the handlebars while a meshed veil covers her face. The posture reads as determination: the garment that restricts her sight will not stop her movement. In a different image, a burka-clad figure spins so swiftly that her billowing veil seems to lift her off the ground; Persian script painted on a brick wall nearby reads, I dreamed that my homeland was prosperous.
In The Music of Poverty and Violence, a woman carries an automatic rifle on her shoulder and mimics the posture of a violinist, bowing the barrel with a wooden stick. The juxtaposition of weapon and instrument is both jarring and eloquent: survival, grief and the strange poetry of life under threat.
Other photos dramatize the limits placed on girls and women. Liberation shows a woman tossing her burka skyward; a poem by Mahnaz states, In the name of being a woman, today I will free myself from oppression and darkness to the breeze, to the height of the sky. Girl by the Door frames a young girl clutching a battered schoolbook, half her face hidden behind a chained wooden door while light glances on the other half. The caption explains that after new restrictions on female education, girls risked their lives to attend school and were targeted to deter families from sending daughters to class.
Some images capture fleeting moments of joy and hope. Life Is Today depicts a girl dancing on a ridge with snow-capped mountains beyond; Arance points out that the child is un-veiled and free in that instant, her shadow resembling an airplane leaving. When Will We Laugh From the Bottom of Our Hearts Again? shows a girl in sunglasses laughing, while Autumn Games captures three children tossing leaves into the air. Yet the photographs always carry a double register: delight shaded by the awareness of danger and deprivation.
Other works emphasize cultural prohibitions. Vestiges of the Present shows a woman seen only from the shoulders down, holding a boombox that is silent; the caption reminds viewers that music, dancing and singing by women in public are forbidden. In a stark scene, a girl crouches as an unseen gunman aims a rifle at her, but she clutches a notebook whose Farsi message reads, There is no justice, a blunt reference to the curtailing of girls’ schooling.
The series also contains images of small, defiant regeneration. From the Depths of Darkness depicts a woman holding soil and twigs from which a butterfly emerges. And the Glory of Growing Happens Within Us shows a burka-covered woman cradling a sprouting plant, suggesting that life and possibility persist even in confinement.
Neither cousin had formal photographic training. Their early experiments with composition, light and staged movement — all accomplished with cellphone cameras and the help of neighbors and relatives as subjects — attracted Arance’s attention because of the way they married bleak surroundings to lyrical, often political ideas. The captions and short poems, translated by Arance, deepen the work’s emotional and narrative layers.
Taken together, the photographs read as both testimony and refusal. As Arance puts it, the images answer the Taliban’s claim that narrow restrictions are the destiny of Afghan women: I am saying this is not my destiny. The cousins translate their daily realities into images that insist on the possibility of freedom, however fragile: small rebellions made visible through dance, songless music, books, bicycles and the simple persistence of growth.
The project has garnered attention for its aesthetic power and its courage. It asks viewers to hold multiple truths at once: the harshness of life under repressive rule, the particular vulnerability of Hazara communities, and the inner lives of women who dream, resist and imagine futures beyond the limits imposed upon them.
Diane Cole, who covers photography and culture for various publications, reported on the project and its showing at Photoville. The cousins’ work remains a vivid example of how everyday tools, imagination and collaboration can create visual testimony that is intimate, inventive and politically resonant.