These glossy Taliban passport photos will make you do a double take

Magnum

These glossy Taliban passport photos will make you do a double take
(Image credit: Magnum)

As The New Yorker prepares to move to 1 World Trade Center, the magazine's photo department is digging through its archives and sharing interesting finds online. The photo archivists didn't disappoint when they recently posted images of Taliban soldiers that looked like they were taken in 1993 at a Glamour Shots in the local mall.

The New Yorker's Thea Traff explains that in 2001, Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak traveled to Kandahar, where photographs and art featuring the human image were forbidden. Pictures were necessary for passports, however, so Taliban leader Mullah Omar bent the rules and selected a few businesses in Kandahar that could take the photos.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.