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Bamiyan Mirror. Bamiyan Mirror is a series of 10 photographs (chosen from over 240) shot on location in Bamiyan Valley, Afghanistan, during William Cobbing’s artist residency at Turquoise Mountain in 2009.

Using the destroyed Bamiyan Buddha monuments as a starting point, the project investigates ideas of iconoclasm and erosion and entropy with regard to the material representation of the body in the landscape. The photographs featured mirror reflections of the niches left behind after the Taliban destruction of the Buddha monuments in Bamiyan, representing a rare dissemination of images of the Buddhas due to their inaccessibility caused by the war in Afghanistan.

Cobbing linked the shocking television footage of the Buddha monuments being blown up by the Taliban in March 2001 to the kind of theatrical imagery of war disseminated in the mass media, what Baudrillard called “war porn.” Cobbing referenced Alfredo Jaar’s Lament of the Images (2002) in which the dramatic conventions of photojournalism are questioned through turning the camera lens back on the witness of the Rwanda genocide, and to the haunted yet picturesque landscape. The act of taking the Bamiyan Mirror photographs of the reflected Buddha niches in the mirror led to Cobbing facing away from them to capture the surrounding landscape, creating a more coherent impression of the context in which they existed. The niches that once framed the Buddhas became more hauntingly resonant as a shadow or negative form, indelibly highlighting their absence. Cobbing’s research referenced notions of ruin and entropic dispersal of earthly material present in Land Art from the sixties; from Michael Heizer’s City monument that referenced pre-Columbian forms, to Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown with its displacement of geological strata. These Land Art works can be linked to the shifting appearance of the Bamiyan Buddhas in the landscape since their creation in the 6th century, through numerous conflicts.