Picture Perfect
Print this Page- By John Sumser
- Country: Afghanistan
- Dates of Service: 1977–1978
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Excerpt from A Land Without Time: A Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan by John Sumser. He arrived in Afghanistan as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the summer of 1977.
One of the things we had to do almost immediately was to get Afghan identification cards made. During my stay in Afghanistan, no one ever asked to see my card: Identification cards in a land with a 95 percent illiteracy rate are meaningless. Societies that operate on the presumption of illiteracy are not as obsessed with paper as we are. Chuck, Ed, Melissa, Jessie, Jim, Betty, and I went to a small photography shop to have our pictures taken. The shop had two rooms divided by a heavy black curtain; a waiting room with a clerk behind a desk and the room where the photographer worked. We crowded into the tiny waiting room and Chuck was the first called to go into the second room to get his photograph taken.
Chuck was laughing when he pushed his way past the curtain to come back into the waiting room.
"What's so funny?"
"You'll see," he said.
Ed went next and he shook his head in mock amazement when he came back into the waiting room. "Don't say anything!" Chuck warned him. "Let them see for themselves."
Then it was my turn. Past the curtain was a room with the walls painted black. A large varnished box on a tripod stood on one side of the room facing a stool about four feet away. I sat on the stool and the cameraman moved me around so that I was in the proper position, then went over to the large box camera. The camera was made of wood and was at least a foot square. A capped lens was stuck in the middle of the side facing me. The photographer looked from me to the lens a few times to make sure we were lined up. He adjusted one of the lights. Then he reached over and snatched the cap off the lens, waited a second or two, and quickly replaced it.
And he told me I was finished.
None of us could believe that the photos would come out well. An American photographer would have taken two or three pictures just to make sure that one was good. An American photographer would have used a high-tech Japanese camera with an 80-millimeter lens and would know all about aperture and shutter-speed adjustments. This man had a wooden box apparently from an American Civil War museum and his shutter speed adjustments took place in his brain and his wrist. There was no aperture adjustment, just a hole in the side of the box.
When the IDs arrived, the photographs were better than the ones on our passports.
This was my first lesson in how much?and how well?you could do with very little. Afghans were masters at exhausting the potential of whatever scarce resources were available.
About the Author:
John Sumser is currently a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Stanislaus.