In honor of the International Day for Mine Awareness, April 4, LightBox has updated the gallery above with more images from Marco Grob’s ongoing project with those affected by land mines. The new photos, at the front of the gallery, were taken in Cambodia in October, 2011. The United Nations Mine Action Service is also hosting a photography exhibit, open to the public at the United Nations headquarters starting April 5, 2012. More information available here.
It costs only about $2 to lay a land mine — but several thousand dollars to dig it out. An average of 52 people each month suffer injury from land mines in Afghanistan alone. To bring attention to the problems — food farmers are unable to plant in contaminated fields; women are unable to access water because surrounding areas are mined; citizens can’t rebuild on land because of the danger of explosion — the U.N. Mine Action Programme of Afghanistan (MAPA), which works to clear 1 million mines and unexploded bombs a year in Afghanistan, approached TIME’s Marco Grob, known best for his portraiture work, to photograph Afghan land-mine victims. The photos commemorate April 4 as International Land Mine Day and are part of an exhibition that goes on view April 7, 2011, in Kabul.
Improvising a studio on a former battlefield near one of the country’s most densely contaminated minefields, Grob and his team found the snow and wind a challenge — forcing them to enlist the aid of one of the U.N. mine clearers, who held a reflector over subjects’ heads to keep the snow off them. When approaching each subject, Grob says, with time to get only four of five exposures, he didn’t want to showcase their injuries. “I choose to concentrate on their faces and the textures of Afghanistan.”
Grob, a former soldier in the Swiss army who was trained in laying mines, says his work is far from over. Funding — which is used to train and employ 14,000 men across Afghanistan, providing livelihoods while cleaning up communities — is the only obstacle to ridding Afghanistan of mines. With donations, Afghanistan could be cleared of mines in years instead of decades. “I hope my work helps to raise awareness,” says Grob, “and will help keep the required money flowing.”
–by Deirdre Van Dyk
— Marco Grob is a TIME contractor who takes portraits of people throughout the world. He was commissioned to photograph a portfolio of images for last year’s TIME 100.
