One woman’s journey through the closed doors of Afghanistan’s wives, mothers and sisters; The Bookseller of Kabul meets On The Road To Kandahar.

In March 2004 award-winning photographer Lana Slezic went to Afghanistan with a preconceived notion and a knapsack full of naivety. She believed that since the ousting of the Taliban in 2001, girls were back at school, women had discarded the burka and in general, the environment was a less oppressive one for women. This notion was based on what she had gathered from television and newspaper reports immediately following the end of the suffocating Taliban regime. However what she soon discovered there prompted her to lengthen a six week assignment into a two year stay.

Quietly with a young female Afghan as her friend and translator, Lana began travelling throughout many regions of the country and found countless women and girls who were willing to tell her their desperately cloistered stories. Their photographs form Lana's harrowing photobook, Forsaken, and their stories are the focus of her incredible journey in A Door To Nowhere.

Lana writes, “I was horrified by their words, shocked at their illiteracy and saddened by their tears. But it was their resilience, almost fuelled by ignorance that wrapped itself around my heart and mind. The Afghan women I met were warm, generous and for the most part, eager to share their time with me. Without exception, everywhere I went there were issues of domestic violence, forced marriage, seclusion, illiteracy and a lack of freedom on the most basic of levels.”

Every western organization that has interest in Afghan women, from NGOs to the US government, seems to own the copyright on how to save them. What Lana Slezic tells us in A Door To Nowhere is that the people most knowledgeable about Afghan women, are Afghan women themselves. The best way to help them is first and foremost to listen.