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(CNN)Three young men in jeans and sneakers stare back fiercely, holding the cues they were playing with in the pool hall.
Nasima, an elementary school student dressed in a traditional black-and-white uniform, looks ahead soberly with her hands clasped together.
Mr. Saifudin, with a shemagh casually draped around his shoulders, holds up a stack of fresh bills and sports a mischievous grin on his face. He works in the currency business, exchanging money on his city’s street corners.
They are the Afghans in Jens Umbach’s latest project, which the photographer hopes to turn into an 11-chapter book.
In a series of portraits, Umbach depicts people who live in and around Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan’s third-largest city and a key location for US-led military action in the country. The portraits are set against a plain white background, omitting any context of the subjects’ surroundings.
“If someone offers you $300 to pick up a Kalashnikov and that will feed your children, that was a big incentive at the time,” Umbach said. “And it probably would be again if the situation got to that point.”
For years after 2001, Mazar-e-Sharif has been considered a model of economic prosperity and stability in the country. But with the Taliban’s recent attacks in the nearby city of Kunduz and the city’s unshaky transition back to local Afghan forces, life in Mazar-e-Sharif doesn’t seem as stable as it once was.
It’s quite different than the situation Umbach said he experienced during his time there.
“What we did then, we couldn’t do now,” Umbach said. “Now, I have a permanent record of what it was and what it could be and also some proof that it would be wrong to leave Afghanistan to itself now after having promised to help rebuild it.”
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