Freedom’s Edge
New Zealand photographer Victoria Ginn was invited to Afghanistan in 1978 as the personal guest of a government official. When she refused to sleep with him, she was accused of drug smuggling and imprisoned. Then the government was deposed, the country fell to pieces and any hope for escape began to seem like a mirage. Freedom’s Edge is the story of her journey, imprisonment and eventual release, illustrated with a selection of rare photos saved from the Afghan censors. Ginn adopts a compressed, almost poetic style in the narrative, never saying more than she needs to, and managing the difficult feat of conveying her younger self’s almost wilful naivety and her older self’s more seasoned insights simultaneously. A powerful study of the psychology of imprisonment, as well as a portrait—in words and images—of Afghanistan in the last days before the Soviet invasion and the rise of the Taleban.
The Dominion, March 2001—“Paperbacks” column. Reviewer David Larsen