Roses Under the Thorns

The photographer Oriane Zérah has split her life between France and Afghanistan for over ten years, including six spent full time in Kabul, where she now resides. She is fascinated by the contrast between the passion that Afghans have for flowers and the violence that has ravaged the country for forty years.
Oriane Zérah turned this singular relationship with flowers into a guiding motif in her astonishing series of portraits, which offers a unique vision of this war-torn country. As she put it, "what my images want to show is the very power of roses apart from their thorns."