It is not easy to photograph the market. It is hard to overcome the allure of genre scenes, the charm of exoticism, the commonplaces of orientalism, the temptation to grasp this whole buzz at once, and in the end nothing remains in our hands.
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This time the star of Russian press photo, Ilya Varlamov did not really succeed to do it either. True, his pictures made on two Afghan markets are not bad photos, you browse them with nostalgia to recall those smells and sounds, the dusty heat and the excitement of discovery, but they are far from, say, the precision and accuracy of the shots of the Afghan anti-opium war series.
Lovely photo essay via Poemas del rÃo Wang.