Freedom’s Edge
Powerful in quite a different way is Freedom’s Edge, the gripping account of a young photographer’s imprisonment in Afghanistan at the time of the 1978 revolution. Just 23, Victoria Ginn, a New Zealand-born, self-taught photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Museum for the Performing Arts, New York, set out to “document the human psyche via the human face” in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Armed only with her “third eye”—her cameras—and the naivety of the innocent abroad, Ginn found herself both attracted and repulsed by the cultures in which she found herself—cultures in which women are socially invisible and domestically subservient, and where her very presence as a single, blonde Western woman contradicted the status quo.
Though the story is being told only now, more than 20 years after the event, Ginn recounts her trek through the vale of shadows as if it had happened yesterday. Spare, vivid, never self-indulgent, Freedom’s Edge is made even more pleasurable for the reader by the inclusion of 68 black-and-white plates printed from the films Ginn was able to recover before she left Afghanistan—at the cost of a friend’s imprisonment. She never saw her confiscated cameras again.
A courageous woman; a compelling story.
Kennedy Wayne, Signature Magazine Aug/Sept 2001