Andrew Quilty: ‘Every person I would speak to touched on the close proximity between life and death’
Sydney’s waters might have saved photojournalist Andrew Quilty. “It has been a balm for sure,” he says, distracted as he tries to find the path that will take us from a car park into the Malabar Headland national park.
From August 2021, Quilty documented horrifying scenes on the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan, as the Taliban recaptured the city. He had called the city home for nearly a decade. In November 2021, he came home to write a book, his first time back since before the pandemic. Back in his home town, Sydney, he felt adrift, emotionally homeless.
In the many dark months after his return – staying with friends, feeling lost and dealing with the personal aftermath of his experience, he swam religiously, often from the Malabar boat ramp across Long Bay, which points below us like an index finger into the eastern suburbs.
Then, in mid-2023, about two years after his return, someone told him about another Sydney bay – the fickle, folkloric Mackenzies Bay 10km up the coast between Bondi and Tamarama. For years at a time, it’s just a rocky inlet. Then, out of nowhere, a complexity of conditions – long-term climatic cycles, season, swell, wind direction – dump sand on the shore and the bay becomes a proper beach. In August 2023, the beach returned for the first time since 2021. Swimmers, sunbathers and dog walkers reclaimed it with delight.
Since leaving Afghanistan, 42-year-old Quilty had been unmotivated to pick up his camera and was struggling with “reverse culture shock”. All the conversations about money and real estate seemed so frivolous.
“I just kind of dived headfirst into Sydney-affluent,” Quilty says as we follow a boardwalk up through Malabar Headland’s wind-whipped sandstone and coastal heathland. “Confronting that culture shock head on, it was like, these very Bondi-looking people – beautiful couples and men with perfectly waxed chests and women, I don’t even know where to begin, I mean, it’s all very eye opening for me coming back. Bikinis have shrunk of course.”
But the very idea of the bay beach resonated. It made him consider the fragility of everything, of home, community, relationships. It was, he thought, “another ephemeral place”, a place like his former home, Kabul.
It really comes down to the lack of any sense of life being as close to death as it felt in Afghanistan
He retrieved a stack of his favourite but discontinued Kodak film, stored in his mother’s freezer, and in early September started to photograph Mackenzies Beach.
The project diverted him from difficult thoughts, as did the process of writing and curating his second book, a substantially visual monograph released last year – This is Afghanistan 2014-2021. (He wrote his first book, August in Kabul: America’s last days in Afghanistan, published in 2022, in three months.)
This is Afghanistan is a remarkable collection. Alongside images of daily life (a young peddler carrying his wares on a dusty road, young men dressed in red tuxedo jackets and bow ties for an engagement party, two girls wearing hijabs bent over a book) are harrowing images of war’s aftermath, including Quilty’s 2016 Gold Walkley-winning “The Man on the Operating Table”. He was the first journalist to reach a Médecins Sans Frontières trauma centre in Kunduz after it was hit by US airstrikes in 2015. There he found bodies still in the rubble, including that of a man still on an operating table under a fallen ceiling panel.
Quilty has questioned his responses to the traumatic scenes he photographed; he has watched friends and colleagues struggle far more than he has. I ask him why he thinks he has coped better. He hesitates before attempting an explanation: “I think, to be completely honest, and to be very self-critical, I think I lacked a certain sense of empathy that allowed me to endure those moments and to endure it over a long period of time.”
Nevertheless, there was still a degree of personal aftermath and with professional assistance, he is addressing that now.
“It became very obvious to me quite quickly, it’s probably obvious to Blind Freddie, that close to 10 years in [Afghanistan] and particularly after the upheaval at the end, which is by far the most traumatic of all the experiences, that it would be wise to talk to someone.”
Related: Afghan girls detained and lashed by Taliban for violating hijab rules
There is a low rumble of thunder behind us and we turn just as a lightning bolt pierces a looming black sky. The wind is howling but Quilty wants to keep going – to Magic Point at the tip of the headland to show me the view.
In the early days of his career as a photographer at the Australian Financial Review, consumed by work and surfing, Quilty lived in a house on the beach at Maroubra with one of his closest friends, photographer James Alcock. He could see Magic Point from his bed. It took him years to actually visit it.
Quilty was recently best man when Alcock married his partner, Jess. Over a decade, the couple put him up during his visits home and he has been with them on and off since he returned from Kabul. “This is as close to a home as I’ve had for a long time.” (For a few weeks he has subletted a friend’s apartment but now needs to move again.)
In Kabul, he found a home, sharing a house with foreign journalists and aid workers all “doing work that we felt was important”. The house was a prison during the first Taliban regime. The grief of losing that home remains. “Just watching that community evaporate and disperse all over the world in the blink of an eye.”
In the two years he’s been back in Australia, he has struggled to find a professional challenge that takes him close to the edge he likes. “It really comes down to the lack of any sense of life being as close to death as it felt in Afghanistan … so fragile that every person I would speak to or photograph or interview had experiences that inevitably touched on the close proximity between life and death.”
In the past couple of years, Quilty has made four trips to the Northern Territory where he has found something close to what he’s looking for. It appeals, he says, because it’s “a little bit wild, a little bit lawless. It seems like a treasure trove of untold stories”.
He continues to work on his Mackenzies Bay project, returning at different times of the day searching for different light, different aspects. As an adjunct to his photographic project about impermanence, he sends up a drone each day for a “video journal”. He wants the work to become an exhibition, possibly another book.
The beach is starting to disappear again. Perhaps it has another month, perhaps less. Quilty is planning to return to Afghanistan in the middle of the year.
This is Afghanistan 2014-2021 by Andrew Quilty is out now through MUP
