2. If someone had asked me even in late June what I was expecting to do this summer, I certainly wou

2. If someone had asked me even in late June what I was expecting to do this summer, I certainly would not have imagined myself out here on alien terrain, about to trek over two hundred kilometers across 11 days with 8 others in perhaps one of the world’s more dubious places to travel.I’m an outdoorsy type to be sure, but I’m not crazy. Yet I’ve come to this far northeast corner of Afghanistan to join an expedition run by Studio D Radiodurans, an international design research agency that studies human behavior one half of the year, and guides adventurous explorers to extraordinary corners of the globe in the other.I was unexpectedly offered a fellowship to come on board this year’s team of five men and two other women as a photo documentarian, whose main purpose is to capture the entire expedition in a series of images, recording the operational practices, norms, and emotional journey of the experience. Everyone else on the team also has a role to play, from wayfinding to negotiating prices for our daily pack animals to keeping inventory of our water supply. What drew me to this expedition was not just that its timing seemed almost serendipitous (I was contemplating what I would do after I wrapped up a freelance contract in Portland), but because it presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a country and culture that not many people would ever get the chance to witness first hand. It’s a place that’s much maligned by most media coverage, and there was more a sense of intrigue, rather than fear, involved in the idea of seeing what may lie beneath the headlines. -- source link

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