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Farzana Wahidy
Farzana Wahidy (born 1984) is an award-winning Afghani documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her photographs of women and girls in Afghanistan. She was the first female photographer in Afghanistan to work with international media agencies such as the Associated Press (AP) and Agence France-Presse (AFP).
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Wahidy studied at the AINA Photojournalism Institute set up in Kabul by Reza Deghati to train Afghani women and men to pursue careers in photojournalism. Beginning in 2002, she was one of 15 students selected from more than 500 applicants. She studied under the Iranian-French photojournalist Manoocher Deghati.
Afghanistan photographer farzana wahidy
Life and career
Born in Kandahar in 1984, Wahidy moved with her family to Kabul at the age of six. She was a teenager when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996. At age 13 she was beaten in the street for not wearing a burqa. During the Taliban era she was able to attend an underground school with about 300 other students in a residential area of Kabul, and when U.S.-led forces ended Taliban rule in 2001, she began high school. She became the first female Afghan photographer to work for the AFP and later AP. In 2007 she received a scholarship to take the two-year photojournalism programme at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, returning to Afghanistan in 2010.
Wahidy uses her access as a woman to focus on Afghan women and their roles in their segregated society, including prostitutes and women imprisoned for "moral crimes".
In 2009 she was an Open Society Institute grantee for her documentary project on Afghan women. Wahidy is the recipient of the National Geographic All Roads Photography Program Merit Award and was nominated for World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass.
Her work is featured in the American documentary Frame by Frame.