In pictures: Afghan box camera

Since May 2011, Austrian artist Lukas Birk and Irish ethnographer Sean Foley have been researching the rapidly disappearing culture of Afghanistan's street photographers.

Travelling to Kabul, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, and Peshawar in Pakistan, Birk and Foley were invited by photographers into their homes and studios to be mentored in the use of a simple wooden camera known in Dari (Afghan Persian) as the kamrae e-faoree.

Hand-made out of wood, the kamrae e-faoree is both camera and darkroom. It has been used in the region for years and generations of Afghans have had their portraits taken with it.

The camera is completely manual - it does not use electricity - the photographic process is analogue using chemicals and paper rather than film.

Under Taliban rule, photography was banned along with television, music and cinema, forcing many photographers to hide or destroy their cameras.

"Foreseeing the changing times, one photographer in Herat, Hekmatullah Arbabzadeh, began to amass a collection of kamra-e-faoree photographs after 2001, mostly portraits of schoolchildren from in and around the city. He calls them his “treasures," said Birk and Foley.

Other photos unearthed in the project include this example of a hand-painted portrait taken by Abdul Samad of his family - his mother sits in the centre. The photo is from a family album belonging to his son, Abul Satar. The album was kept safe during the civil war and safely hidden during Taliban rule by Abdul Satar’s aunt.

Afghan Box Camera by Lukas Birk and Sean Foley is published by Dewi Lewis Publishing.