The recent death of an old friend of mine from my Afghan days sent me rushing to my small photo archive to pull out some pictures of him. To my astonishment I had none. I was deeply saddened. So instead of any images of the friend himself I had to make do with the photographs below - which at least helped smoke a few memories out of the back of my brain. They are some forty years old now. I had never owned a camera before but I bought a little Pentax SLR, taught myself the basics and got cracking. I can vaguely remember taking most of these images but I destroyed the negatives long ago so they are scans of prints originally made by local photo shops in the backstreets of Kabul, using who knows what chemicals. The first and second images have always made me think that if you could time travel back to medieval England with a camera you might bring back to the present images like these. Looking back all those years I remember the Afghans as being both dignified and friendly people and I think that maybe you can see some of that in these images.

The lesson I’ve learnt: take photos of your friends and keep them somewhere safe because they mark out the days of your life and provide something to hold onto when the friends themselves are gone.