At the Crossroads: Qandahar in Images and Empires features the earliest known photographs of Qandahar, Afghanistan, taken between 1880 and 1881 at the end of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Today, they offer insights into the region, its local populations, and its rich cultural traditions.

• Foreword, James Cuno and Luis Monreal
• Director’s Statement, Mary E. Miller
• Qandahar at the Crossroads of Space and Time, Alka Patel
• “Qandahar: Refocusing the Optics of Imperialism”, Frances Terpak
• Exhibition Texts and Plates, Aparna Kumar
• Text in Dari and Pashto Translation

Alka Patel is associate professor in the Department of Art History and in the PhD Program for Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Frances Terpak is curator of photographs at the Getty Research Institute, where she has built the photographic and optical devices collections. She has mounted pioneering exhibitions on the history of photography that span the early years of the medium to the contemporary period, as practiced in Algeria, China, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia. The Chinese translation of her most recent book, Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China (Getty Publications, 2011), received enthusiastic reception in that nation for reframing the Western view of this subject from a Chinese perspective.

Aparna Kumar is a lecturer in Art and Visual Cultures of the Global South at the University College of London. She received her PhD in art history at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Her dissertation project, Partition and the Historiography of Art in South Asia, was awarded the inaugural UC Berkeley South Asia Art and Architecture Dissertation Prize in 2021.