Backstory: A burqa's-eye view

Thwarted, I still couldn't let the idea go. So I took the burqa with me in a bag everywhere I went, looking for moments when my driver would let me wear it. At the Mughal garden I clumsily threw the burqa over my head – there's a trick to writhing through yards of fabric to find the three-inch-wide spot for your eyes.When I stood up in it from the back of our SUV, my long-suffering driver looked at me and smiled and said, "You look nice."

I nearly fell over – both from the disorienting tiny mesh screen and amazement at what I'd just heard. "But, Abdullah," I countered. "You can't see me. How can you possibly say I look nice?"

He smiled and turned away.

I wore the burqa whenever I could – in the park, the countryside, a bazaar. Stumbling, at first, and coping with the uncomfortable confinement of the cheap polyester, I took pictures of the world around me, through a veil that for many Afghan women is the way the public world is seen every minute of every day.

I took my burqa to Bamiyan, where the Taliban in 2001 dynamited the ancient Buddha statues carved into sandstone cliffs. I walked up a short incline and threw on the burqa, and heard one of the local guides shout up to me, "Can you see?"

I turned around, covered in the robe. "Of course, I can't see anything," I yelled back. "I'm wearing a burqa." Later, I assured the four men who'd accompanied me that if men had to wear burqas, there'd soon be no burqas in Afghanistan.

In the end, I made a series of photos I call "Circle Vision," because of the way the circles in the burqa mesh screen divide up the field of vision. For me, they ultimately came to represent little intersecting boundaries that remind me of the many woven boundaries encircling the lives of Afghan women every day.

It was the briefest of encounters with their world – but an enlightening one. I saw a bit of what they see, and learned, in surprising ways, what it means to be seen inside a burqa.

I was, in fact, stopped by the police – twice. They wanted to know who I was and why I was wearing a burqa; each time, my guides explained I was just interested in seeing the world the way Afghan women do, so that I could share it back home.

The last day I wore my burqa, I'd been out in the neighborhood with one of the security guards, an educated young man who'd told me a lot about his life, including the fact that he had many girlfriends and no plans to marry. When I took the deep-blue burqa off for the last time, I turned to see the young man smiling. "You look good in a burqa," he said, much to my astonishment. "You put that on again, and I just might pop the question."

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