Burke + Norfolk: Photographs from the war in Afghanistan. Tate Modern

The first ever photographs to be taken in Afghanistan were by an Irish photographer named John Burke. Simon Norfolk recognised in Burke’s photographs a humane and critical eye for the British colonial project. He travelled to Afghanistan to engage in a kind of photographic re-imagining in ‘collaboration’ with Burke.

The photographs that Norfolk has produced of Afghanistan are undeniably beautiful but the beauty is, as he puts it, merely a device to make people look and think. He has made a short film, which plays at the exhibition, to explain the motivation behind the project. His anger at the war and the waste of lives and money shines through. At the end of the film no one moved for a good thirty seconds, the film was so affecting (admittedly as this was at the Tate Modern the crowd was probably quite a middle class liberal bunch).