Library of Congress adds Club member Foley's photos to collection

The Library of Congress collection now includes more than 100 photos taken in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Photo Committee Vice Chair Michael Foley.

Carol Johnson, Library of Congress photography curator, accepted the final photos on Nov. 21. The Library chose the photos after Foley met Johnson at the June 29 Photo Committee luncheon meeting.

“It is such a great honor for me that the Library has accepted my offer,” Foley said. “I regard my photos as messages, and even gifts, from the people I meet on my travels, so I put great value on the public being able to view them.”

Foley says he can’t think of a better institution to preserve his photos and to make them available for free to researchers and for non-profit use.

“I was quite overwhelmed when the Library’s selection committee agreed to accept them…a great honor indeed!” Foley said.

Foley traveled to Afghanistan four times in 2002, soon after the collapse of the Taliban, in order to set up a distance learning center in Kabul as part of the World Bank's Global Development Learning Network.

The aim of the center is to connect, by videoconference and the Internet, policymakers and administrators in the newly formed Afghan government to development practitioners in other countries around the world and to learn from their experiences.

In his spare time, Foley wandered the streets of Kabul taking photos of the people he encountered. They were enthusiastic about being photographed after the long ban imposed by the Taliban.

The result was an exhibition at the World Bank in Washington in 2003, which was held to raise money for the Asciana (meaning “nest”) school for street children in Kabul. The children were often the sole breadwinners for their families after their fathers were killed in the various wars preceding the fall of the Taliban and their mothers were not allowed out alone.

The newspaper boy in the photograph was one such child, selling the first English language newspaper in Kabul after the liberation. In five days, the exhibition raised almost $10,000 for the school’s hot lunch program.

The photos chosen by the Library are from that collection and from others that Foley took in 2009, plus some that he took in Pakistan over the years. The digital files will be available in the coming months on the Library’s Web servers, but some photos can be viewed at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelfoleyphotography/sets/72157594545646722/

In addition, Foley displayed his "Faces of South Asia" photo exhibition in the Club's lobby in June 2009. The exhibit was co-sponsored by the Club's International Correspondents Committee and the Photography Committee.