Precedents for the Masood portrait

This image is in Kevin Sudeith’s blog at warrug.com

I’m not sure of the source of this photograph, its date, or location (all of which would be interesting) but the rug depicted here is clearly an earlier version of the rug contributed by Max Allen in our previous post.

A deeper source of the (photographic) imagery for these rugs is found in Dr Whitney Azoy’s article “Masood’s Parade: Iconography, Revitalisation and Ethnicity in Afghanistan” in Expedition magazine (the link is to a PDF file). The article discusses the pervasiveness and range of iconographic mood in the photographs, posters and paintings of Masood available in Afghanistan in 2002.