Chinak, Looking Towards the Kurram River
1879
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1879
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Chinak, Looking Towards the Kurram River is a 1879 by John Burke, a Impressionism work, depicting Ireland, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a quiet hillside village called Chinak, with a few flat-roofed houses and a winding dirt road leading down to the Kurram River. This photo was taken during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, but there’s no fighting in sight. Burke traveled with British troops, yet he focused on the land itself—no battles, just places where history happened. The calm scene makes the war feel even stranger. To see more of Burke’s work from the same conflict, look up John Burke (Irish, 1845–1915).
The subject of this album is the Second Anglo-Afghan War, which was fought from 1878 to 1880. John Burke was the first photographer to photograph extensively in Afghanistan and the main photographer covering that conflict. The technology of the day did not permit action shots of battles. As is usual for early conflict photography, the pictures are landscapes of the sites of momentous incidents, views of camps and civil and military infrastructure, and portraits of the soldiers and their leaders.
This album includes some of the earliest photographs of Afghanistan.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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