To express the constant feeling of precariousness in the lives of the inhabitants of Afghanistan, Lida Abdul uses local people as actors in her native land to shoot her works. In Brick sellers of Kabul what most strikes the viewer is the confidence in the way Lida Abdul depicts a surreal situation: A row of kids queues to sell bricks that they collected from a collapsed structure to a man who stacks the bricks up into a cubic sculpture, perhaps in an effort to erect the very same structure the bricks originally came from. The action of tossing the bricks occurs during a sandstorm, a scene both full of harmony and madness at the same time. The power of these pictures comes from the will Lida Abdul has to evoke, rather than to report directly, the devastation of a land. She evokes this destruction through tiny gestures that become rituals, delicate sounds produced by the wind that become a chant, a prayer, and a dialogue that, as sudden as lightning, carry us back to the cruel reality.of.need.
