Axe Me Biggie (also titled Mister Take My Picture) by Stephen Dupont was made during three hours on March 13, 2006, near Kabul's central bus station, where anonymous Afghans asked to be photographed.
The project emerged from Dupont's long engagement with Afghanistan and from the unsettled conditions of Kabul during the years after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. The title preserves his rough phonetic memory of a Dari request—"Mister, take my picture"—so that the project begins not with the photographer’s command, but with the sitters' appeal to be seen. In that exchange, the work examines recognition, dignity, and the uneasy ethics of documentary photography in a conflict zone.
Men, children, police officers, vendors, and passersby sit or stand before improvised backdrops, often facing the camera with steady expressions. Yet the portraits do not fully seal them off from their surroundings. Edges of cloth, bystanders, dust, and fragments of the crowd remain visible, turning each sitting into an environmental portrait. The resulting mood is tense, alert, and public: the subject is isolated for a moment, but the social pressure around the portrait is never erased.
Dupont used a reconditioned Polaroid Land Camera with Type 665 black-and-white positive-negative film, allowing him to give each sitter an instant positive print while keeping the negative for later enlargement. In the field, the negatives were preserved in a sodium sulphate solution, then washed and dried after he returned from the street. Scratches, emulsion marks, and uneven borders became part of the final silver gelatin prints, while the rapid pace—100 portraits in about three hours—limited staging and made that pressure part of the process.
The series has been shown in exhibitions including Afghanistan, or The Perils of Freedom at the New York Public Library and later presentations in Australia and Europe. It received the Walkley Award for Portrait Photography in 2007 and the Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award in 2008.
