Terrain of Loss: Afghan Exiles in their Own Land

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Literary Nonfiction. Photography. Middle Eastern Studies. Limited edition of 1,000 copies. Includes essay by the photographer and fifty black and white photographs. Based on independent photographer Andrea Camuto's five extensive, un-embedded stays in Afghanistan, TERRAIN OF LOSS illuminates the life of Afghans almost invisible in our mainstream media. After the fall of the Taliban, a vast migration of refugees was by 2002 the largest assisted repatriation in history, a crisis overshadowed by international military efforts against the Taliban insurgency. By 2005, when Camuto first went to Afghanistan, five million refugees had returned from exile, with more on the way. In her haunting photographs of a brutalized, war-torn land, we see these landless refugee families and, in particular, Afghan women—"resettled" in scarred and bleak landscapes, in a woman's prison, on the windswept plains.

"Andrea Camuto's beautiful, haunting photographs chronicle the struggles of Afghan refugees, particularly women, as they search for home in their war-scarred homeland. Her lens brings home the enormous toll three decades of upheaval have exacted on women and children. Her subjects are mothers who live in fear, children who wander through abandoned buildings and windy plains, the horizons of their lives tragically shortened. It is there, on every page, brought gloriously to life: the pain, the fear, the crushing despair, but also, the dim glints of hope, the small moments of grace."—Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

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