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  • AFP / Thomas Coex
  • AFP / Thomas Coex
  • AFP / Thomas Coex
  • AFP / Thomas Coex

Taking the time

Thomas Coex Friday 11 May 2018

"If you want to know people’s secrets, you need time," writes Thomas Coex, AFP's chief photographer in Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

"You can’t just show up, snap some pictures for a few days and expect that people will open up to you. Especially if they are the guardians of the Tomb of Christ who have been in the Old City of Jerusalem for the last 800 years, the Christian group with the longest continuous presence in the Holy City."

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  • AFP / Johannes Eisele
  • AFP / Ed Jones

The laughter of Shah Marai

Allison Jackson Monday 7 May 2018

"Shah Marai loved to tell dirty jokes. His piercing blue-green eyes would twinkle mischievously as he shared his latest gag. Even before he reached the punchline he would be laughing," writes Kabul bureau chief Allison Jackson in a tribute to AFP's chief photographer, a week after he was killed in a suicide blast in the Afghan capital. 

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AFP / John Macdougall

The traces they leave

Deborah Cole Thursday 3 May 2018

"Arriving in Berlin in the swinging mid-1990s, I found myself drawn not only to the young people reinventing the city, but also to their grandparents who were often generous with their recollections, sometimes dark and traumatic, sometimes rousingly inspiring," writes Berlin-based correspondent Deborah Cole.

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When hope is gone

Shah Marai Monday 30 April 2018

AFP chief photographer in Kabul Shah Marai was killed in a suicide blast in the Afghan capital on April 30, 2018. Here is a blog he wrote two years earlier on covering years of tragedy in his country.

“It was a time of great hope. The golden years,” writes photographer Shah Marai of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2011. Shah Marai is somewhat of an institution at AFP’s Kabul bureau. He joined the agency in 1995, working first as a driver and picking up a camera three years later, when the city and the country was under the rule of the Taliban, who imposed a medieval version of Sharia law. Like many of his compatriots, he saw the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, as a liberation. Fifteen years later, the euphoria is gone. “I’ve never felt life to have so little prospects.”

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