In this birthday party portrait, teenage girls celebrate in secret in Afghanistan

Kiana Hayeri’s anonymous photo is just one of many she took, in collaboration with researcher Mélissa Cornet, to show the realities of life under Taliban rule for women and young girls since the extremist group returned to power in 2021.

The photograph could have been taken at any birthday party: three girls in dresses standing side-by-side in a living room, balloons and streamers strung up around an entryway. The subjects could be friends or sisters, each with long brown hair that falls past their waists. But with their faces turned away from the camera, there’s a reason for their anonymity, and a deeper significance to their unveiled hair. The girls live in Kabul under the increasingly watchful eyes of the Taliban, who returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021 when US troops abruptly withdrew from the country. After initially pledging to honor women’s rights, the Taliban has nearly erased women from public life, sending girls behind closed doors, even to mark occasions such as these. Taken earlier this year by Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Kiana Hayeri, the portrait is just one of many images from a six-month body of work showing the lives of Afghan women as the Taliban has continually stripped them of their basic rights, including requiring veiling in public and banning the sounds of their voices, as well as prohibiting them from secondary school, much of the workforce and many social spaces. Working with French researcher Mélissa Cornet, the pair’s collaborative report “No Woman’s Land” received funding from the Carmignac Photojournalism Award and is exhibiting in Paris this month as a mix of photographs, videos and collaborative art with Afghan girls. Hayeri and Cornet traveled to seven provinces and met with more than 100 women during the first half of the year for the report. They met in 2018 in Kabul and have both lived in Afghanistan on and off for several years. Hayeri was present during the chaos of the US military’s withdrawal, and Cornet returned soon after. “Week by week, there was a different fear,” Hayeri recalled to CNN, beginning with her immediate safety amid the shock of the country’s fall. “As we saw how everyday things changed and events unfolded, the fear became about what was going to happen to society, and what was going to happen to Afghan women.” The pair wanted to present a nuanced view of Afghan women’s lives, they explained in a video interview. Rather than a one-dimensional view of oppression, “No Woman’s Land” is meant to be a longer, deeper look at the “immaterial losses” of a generation of women who have lost hope in the future, Cornet said. As their work shows, the ramifications have been complex.