Daily life in Afghanistan was much different some 40 years ago, before conflict started to take its toll on the country. With the country at peace then, the economy was thriving, employment was commonplace and the tourism industry was burgeoning, according to Joseph Hoyt, an American photographer, who captured facets of Afghan life in the early 1970s. A month-long exhibition of 50 photos taken by Mr. Hoyt was opened in the Afghan capital, Kabul, today (shown here), with the images highlighting the difference between lives lived amidst war and peace. The United Nations promotes peace goals as the dominant factor in all forms of arts and encourages revisiting history to discover how people contributed to their cultures. “Many thousands of Afghans have been killed and countless others have been maimed, blinded, displaced and nearly forgotten. Hope for Afghanistan’s future may lie in our ability to look back at an era in its recent past when the nation was at peace,” wrote Mr. Hoyt in his photographic book 'Afghanistan 1970-1975: Images From an Era of Peace,' which was also launched at the exhibition's inauguration.
