Located south of the city of Kandahar, overlapping the Helmand and Kandahar provinces. A drought in 1998 caused the displacement of 100,000 nomads from the region. Today, Taliban militants are said to traverse the desert in order to cross the border into Pakistan.
It is also supposedly the site of the first substantial archaeological research conducted using Google Earth, where PHD student David Thomas found evidence of villages and other structures hundreds, if not thousands of years old. In a region too volatile to actually allow on-site excavations, Thomas' team have been forced to conduct research halfway across the world.
Here we see a satellite photograph that could just as easily be a square metre, but is closer in scale to what you might see from an airplane passing over. A potent reminder of a war in which every village and camp is taken and re-taken in a desperate back-and-forth. Or the ideological vacuum in which this fighting exists.
But of course, deserts don't move like armies and insurgencies, but outwards in all directions at once. Ironically, with nothing allowed to take root and flourish to curb its spread, it may be the war's only victor.
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This is the first in what will hopefully be a lengthy photo-essay column using satellite images from Google Earth. The project is not a photojournal but an examination of the intersection between geographical and ideological terrain. I intend to provide an alternative to mainstream news sources that focus on the immediate object of catastrophe by giving attention to broader historical/geographical movements as well as that which exists on the fringes of conflict and political intrigue.
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