The military often serves a dual purpose in the lives of the people who make up its forces. It teaches new skills to soldiers—skills they may otherwise have never learned—and it also fosters talents the enlisted already enjoy, using them to help maximize the success of the various objectives the military meets day to day.
Major Stacie Shafran found her skills in photography and writing put to use in the U.S. Air Force, where she’s a public affairs officer. Now based at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Shafran has been deployed twice to Afghanistan and once to Iraq, cataloging her team’s work through photography and writing.
“I am not a photographer by trade,” she said. “But you are a jack of all trades when you are an officer in the Air Force.”
Shafran will be sharing an exhibition of her photography taken while on deployment in Panjshir, Afghanistan, from July 2008 to July 2009. The show catalogs much of the work her team did while deployed, which included preventative reconstruction.
“We were helping the Afghans in the province that we worked in. It was a range of activities,” she explained. “Our engineers worked with them on schools and buildings, our medics would bring supplies or talk to the doctors in the area, our civil affairs team would bring humanitarian assistance such as cooking supplies, and our commander would meet with people like their governor.
“The whole point was to mentor the people in the province and connect them with their central government,” she added.
Wherever the team went, and no matter the mission they were performing, Shafran was there to document the situation with her camera and her writing. Many of her articles and photographs can be found on the U.S. Air Force’s official website at af.mil.
“We were over there to do good work for the Afghan people,” Shafran said. “We wanted to make sure that the Afghan people had a role in what they were doing; it was all about enabling and empowering the people in the province.”
Shafran wasn’t limited to the role of a documenter, but extended her experience in public affairs to help the community use its radio station more efficiently, for example. She was also in the unique position—with several of her female comrades—of being allowed into the Panjshir Women’s Affairs group meeting to help mobilize such important projects as school construction.
“It is something amazing when you see a kid’s eyes light up because they are going to be able to go to school,” she said. “I did a lot of work with programs that were there to help empower women and help them make a living for their families.”
Projects, such as the collective effort of the Panjshir women—guided by U.S. military members—to juice and bottle the fruit that grows in the valley to sell in markets, were cataloged by Shafran’s reporting.
“I thought it was important to show some of the positive work that our military members are doing over there,” she said, “because sometimes it seems like the only thing that gets reported is the negative stuff, like the death toll.”
While many experiences Shafran brought back are positive, the realities of war still made themselves known on deployment. On May 26 of 2009—Memorial Day that year—four of Shafran’s teammates were killed by an improvised explosive device detonated by a suicide soldier. Lt. Col Mark Stratton, Army Master Sgt. Blue Rowe, Senior Airman Ashton Goodman, and Afghani native Abdul Samad were all lost to the attack. Many of the photos in the exhibit will feature Shafran’s late teammates performing their duties.
“I want to be able to put a face to my teammates that were killed,” she said. “I think so often people hear that another troop has been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they just become a number, so I want to show who they were, and what they did, and part of the impact they had on the world.”
Shafran also hopes to present a fresh aspect of the Afghani people, often treated one-dimensionally in the media.
“I want to be able to show that the Afghan people are not all bad people,” she said. “They are people who want to see a change in their country, young girls who want an education, and their mothers who also want to see that.
”Panjshir, which is a valley almost 100 miles north of Kabul—the capital of Afghanistan—also served as a stunning photographic subject, Shafran said.
“Panjshir is in the Hindu Kush mountain area, and it is very green and beautiful,” she said. “The valley that we worked in was gorgeous, and I want to be able to show people that, too.”
Arts Editor Joe Payne is interested in art from all areas of the globe. Contact him at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 30 – Jun 6, 2013.