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Written on the back of this work is: “I’ve dug into my archive for a picture from the first story I ever shot in digital: 'Afghanistan after September 11'. This image was made in Afghanistan in early November of 2001, so maybe you could call it a #thirteenyearsagostagram. After 9/11, I bought a digital camera and pretty much immediately left for Afghanistan, where I spent three years. Until mid-November, I was waiting, mostly around the frontline, near this tree, for the anti-Taliban advance. Now, I try to imagine what it would have been like to have Instagram at that moment. What kind of picture might I have uploaded? I'm surprised how restrained and conventional I shot. I made sequences that still had all the limitations of film. I focused on one situation. I worked it. I remember the headache with the camera, the files, the filing. I felt sometimes like I was an untrained electrician, not a photographer. Nothing of the crazy, unrestrained, all-over-the-place freedom of iPhone shooting now.” — Thomas Dworzak