Simon Norfolk

The seemingly endless number of helicopter pads and hangars at Camp Bastion.

2011

© Simon Norfolk

License this image

In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Room

View by appointment

Artist: Simon Norfolk born 1963
Part of: Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the war in Afghanistan
Medium: Photograph, digital C-print on paper
Dimensions: Image: 366 × 488 mm
support: 381 × 507 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by Simon Norfolk 2016
Reference: P20583

You might like

Simon Norfolk Security lights and communications antennae at Camp Leatherneck.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk One of the huge logistics compounds at Camp Leatherneck. A modern, technological army needs hundreds of thousands of different kinds of objects in order to keep it working. A $100m warplane can be grounded for the want of a $1 part. Supplying these things is a huge drain on the army’s resources and its greatest vulnerability.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk A shaded rest area built by helicoptor re-fuelling crews at Camp Bastion.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk The swimming pool that crowns Tepe Wazir Akhbar Khan, built by the Soviets in the 1970s and restored in recent times at great expense by USAID. It is uncertain if it will ever be used.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk Watchtowers on the perimeter of Camp Bastion.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk Wasteland at the back of shops used as stabling for draught horses. In the distance is the Bala Hissar citadel, now home to an Afghan army base and mooring for one of the American blimps that carry electronic surveillance gear and cameras.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk Pakistani ‘Jingle Trucks’ end their long journey up from Karachi at the gates of Kandahar Air Field where they wait to be scanned, x-rayed and searched. Only people, ammunition and emergency requirements come by aircraft. Warlord-owned security companies protecting convoys can charge $15,000 per truck, but a large part of the fee is paid to Taliban protection rackets.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk Afghan Police being trained by US Marines, Camp Leatherneck.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador Sir William Charters Patey KCMG, his private secretary and his Nepalese mercenary security guards.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk Afghan police trainees being taken to the firing ranges by US Marines, Camp Leatherneck, Helmand.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk The districts of Wazir Akhbar Khan and Sherpur, home to all the NGOs and contractors, occupy the site of the former British fortress from the Second Anglo-Afghan War, ‘the Cantonment’. Glitzy, kitschy ‘poppy-palaces’, flung upon a hectic property boom after the land was illegally re-possessed from squatters can command rents of $20,000 per week when leased out to internationals.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk A watchtower guarding a street of foreign embassies in central Kabul. For the British army these improvised fortifications are called ‘sangars’, although the term is Dari for ‘barricade’ and is one of the few words the British brought home form the Anglo-Afghan Wars.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk There are 16,000 US Marines aboard Camp Leatherneck spread over 1,600 acres. Empty shipping containers are used as storage, wind breaks or blast walls. In May 2010 a mysterious fire, that may have been sabotage, destroyed 9 acres of containers. It burned so furiously that fire fighters even lost two of their fire engines.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk A storage yard at Kandahar Air Field looking out beyond the wire, back into ‘Afghanistan’.

2011

View by appointment
Simon Norfolk The future home of the Afghan Cash and Carry Superstore on the road between the foreign embassies and Kabul airport.

2011

View by appointment