Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Zalmaï Ahad was forced into exile in 1980, at the age of 15, after the Soviet invasion of his country. he travelled to Lausanne, Switzerland . In 1994 he became a Swiss citizen. Following his passion for photography, which he discovered very early in life, he pursued combined studies at both the school of photography of Lausanne and at the Professional Photography Training Center of Yverdon.
In 1989, he began to work as a freelance photographer, travelling around the world from Indonesia to the Egypt, from Cuba (to cover the 40th anniversary of the Cuban revolution) to Central Africa (to cover the fate of the pygmies following extensive deforestation of their land). His work has been published in several magazines and newspapers including the New York Times Magazine, Time Magazine, Le Temps, Newsweek, La Repubblica, ICRC Magazine, Human Rights Watch and Refugees Magazine, a quarterly publication of UNHCR. His first photo book, Eclipse (Umbrage, 2002) deals with the theme of exile and the plight of the uprooted in different corners of the planet: Cuba, India, Mali, the Philippines, Indonesia and Egypt.
Zalmai has exhibited his work around the world at museums, galleries, universities and cultural centers. Return, Afghanistan 2003/UNHCR/Aperture , a large exhibition about the return of the Afghan people to their homeland after years living in exile, is still traveling in Europe; Hidden Afghanistan, produced in conjunction with the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC), premiered in Kabul in 2005 and Zalmai continues to work on this subject—the effect of poppy cultivation on the life of the people.
The originality and remarkable quality of Zalmaï’s work has earned him several national and international prizes including the World Press Joop Swart Master Class, Days Japan 2006 an d Photo District News (PDN) annual award for documentary photography. Zalmaï is a member of the Association Focale, a cooperative of photographers based in Nyon, Switzerland.
Zalmai continues to focus his work on Afghanistan, creating a photographic document of the modern history of Afghanistan.
A traditional user of black and white photos, Zalmaï explains in his book why, for the first time, he chose colour: “I felt that now, after such a long time, there was hope again for Afghanistan. It seemed to me that colours were returning and that they would be those of a peaceful country. And so I set out to find this hope, with — for the first time — colour film in my camera.”
Through the “Return, Afghanistan” exhibition and his book, Zalmaï would like to remind the world of the plight and courage of millions of refugees who have returned to Afghanistan, and of their huge need for assistance in a country devastated by war and now just beginning to reconstruct itself.
As Zalmaï says, “My project tries to capture the determination and the courage of a people that has rarely known peace, their optimism against all odds, and their worry that Afghanistan could still return to the nightmarish condition it is trying to escape.”http://www.zalmai.com