The big picture: Veronique de Viguerie’s burst of colour

Sometimes the best photos happen with the least preparation, or even none at all. In December 2023, Veronique de Viguerie was in Afghanistan documenting women’s stories under Taliban rule since their return to power two years earlier – a potentially forbidding assignment.

“While I was there, Pakistan started to send back undocumented Afghans to Afghanistan,” the French photojournalist recalls, “so I was on my way to the border with Pakistan to meet them. It was very early in the morning and I was in my fixer’s car when I saw this guy with his balloons in the early morning light.”

The day was gearing up to be a tough one. The Kabul-Jalalabad road is known as one of the most dangerous in the world, rife with traffic accidents. In the car, De Viguerie was bracing herself for scenes of distress among the Afghan returnees.

“All the other pictures I took that day were a struggle to make,” she says, “but this was one of those gifts that asks nothing of you. I just saw the man on his bike, opened my window, click, and that’s it. I didn’t even ask the driver to slow down.”

The resulting image is part of a new book (and accompanying exhibition) by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar called Inferno & Paradiso. The book features selections from reportage photographers who were asked to choose two images from their archives – one excruciating and another that gives them joy.

But De Viguerie had a problem: “I mainly have pictures of paradise in inferno or inferno in paradise. This picture looks happy and colourful, with a poetic side to it, but when you know more about what’s happening – the poverty, the jail [Afghanistan’s largest prison, Pul-e-Charkhi, is just out of shot] – it’s not that beautiful.”

Yet beauty persists. “It’s one of these slow moments where life carries on. The sun is shining, the light is very soft and, yeah, there is a little bit of hope,” says De Viguerie – adding, with a nod to that profusion of balloons: “There’s still a place for life’s little superfluities.” 

Inferno & Paradiso is published by L’Artiere Edizioni on 16 July. Photographs from the book will be exhibited at the Cortona on the Move festival in Tuscany from 18 July to 2 November