This photographer has spent decades covering war. But she doesn’t focus on the front lines

A line of refugees treks through a muddy rice field, bags of possessions weighing down their shoulders. They are but some of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who have crossed into Bangladesh after a wave of violence forced them from Myanmar.

A young girl stares through a fogged over window and into a restaurant in Kabul, Afghanistan. She’s hungry and hopes that if she looks through that window for long enough, someone will give her their leftover food.

Three young men raise a red and white flag, shouting and pointing at the sky during a gathering of protesters. Indonesian President Suharto has resigned, bringing his controversial administration to an end after 32 years.

All of these scenes — many years and thousands of miles apart from each other — were documented by photojournalist Paula Bronstein. And all of them are included in an exhibition at this year’s Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, France, as part of a retrospective of her decades-long career bearing witness to injustice. Bronstein also received the 2024 Figaro Magazine Lifetime Achievement Visa d'or Award.

Her pictures are a somber walk through nearly 30 years of history’s humanitarian crises, focused on what she calls “the silent victims of war.”

“My work has never been just frontline. Never,” Bronstein said. “It's always been delving into the deeper stories, really looking at the people, the lives. … How do people live against the backdrop of war?”

Much of Bronstein’s career has focused on Afghanistan. Bronstein frequently visited the country from 2001 to 2022, telling the stories of people living between the Taliban insurgency and America’s forever war.

One of her most poignant images comes from early in the war, in 2002. A young girl named Mohboba stands next to a bullet-ridden wall. She is in line at a clinic to treat leishmaniases, a skin disease caused by protozoan parasites. Impoverished Afghans, Bronstein said, got it due to sleeping on the ground.

Mohboba’s face is dotted with purple ointment — a treatment for the leishmaniases — that parallels the wall behind her. The picture’s statement is clear. Poverty and violence have left their mark on this girl and on the world she lives in. She didn’t have a say in either.

It was in telling stories like that, Bronstein writes in the introduction to her exhibition, that she “began to understand the power of returning.”

“Over the course of those years, I kept uncovering,” Bronstein said. “I was lucky to be able to do such a huge, massive variety of work.”

After years working in Afghanistan, Bronstein was on the ground as US troops began to withdraw and the Taliban began its rapid takeover of the country in 2021. On assignment for The Wall Street Journal at the time, she said that the newspaper evacuated her the day before the Taliban reached Kabul.

After the takeover, Bronstein returned to tell stories about life under Taliban rule. The group has instituted heavy restrictions on media and oppressive control over women — most recently via laws that have closed hair salons and banned women from singing in public.

The Afghan women whose stories Bronstein spent so much of her career telling, “they basically are being erased from society.”

“We all saw it coming,” Bronstein said, “But no one was able to stop or prevent the avalanche of injustice.”

Bronstein said she receives messages from Afghan women who follow her on social media, sending cryptic messages or asking for help. She has also kept in some contact with those she knew from her years working there — a woman who used to own a now-closed hair salon, a woman doctor who has kept her job at a children’s hospital.

But now, Bronstein doesn’t know when she’ll next be back.

Having spent 20 years working there, she now cannot obtain a visa to enter Afghanistan.

Also included in the exhibition are images from the 2010 floods that wrecked Pakistan, killing nearly 2,000 people.

Bronstein, alongside Getty Images colleague Daniel Berehulak, was named a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography for her pictures of the flooding. In their decision, the committee commended the pictures’ “compelling portrayal of the human will to survive.”

The images are terrifying in their level of destruction. One picture shows a village almost completely submerged in water that stretches to the horizon, with people awaiting rescue on a narrow strip of dry land. Another shows a man desperately clinging to the very rescue boat Bronstein was riding in.

“I went out there with rescue teams, because they were trying to rescue people who became stranded,” Bronstein said. “These are poor farmers. They went to try to save the livestock. And then, of course, they themselves can't swim. And this man was hanging on to our boat, and then they pulled another boat over to rescue him because we couldn't even take in any more people.”

At the time, Bronstein saw that level of flooding as “unprecedented.” Today, in a world increasingly affected by climate change, she wonders how much attention that level of natural destruction would garner.

“When people look at those pictures then, they’re thinking ‘Oh, God,’ ” Bronstein said. “But now the flooding is 10 times worse, and we’ve seen so much news coverage of it. Everybody’s kind of numb to it now.”

Bronstein was still working in Afghanistan in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. It was the first European war since World War II, and she knew that is where she needed to be next.

She has worked there as often as she could over the last two years, drawn to the strength of the Ukrainian people and their determination to win.

“They're amazing,” Bronstein said. “You go to an aftermath of a building that was just shelled. And already half neighborhood would be out sweeping up glass. … And then an hour later, they'd be showing up, covering the windows with particle board.”

One of her images is of a young girl juxtaposed against a mountain of rusted, destroyed cars. The scene, a “car cemetery” that sat next to an actual cemetery, had quickly become a war tourism site where dignitaries and families from nearby Kyiv could come view what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion had wrought. The girl, Bronstein said, was there with her family, who had recently returned to Kyiv after initially fleeing at the start of the war.

It is a picture where the scale of damage is contained but feels unfathomable in the face of an innocent child staring into a wreck of burned metal.

And viewing Bronstein’s retrospective en masse, the picture bookends a tragic pairing with her image of the Afghan girl with leishmaniasis. Twenty years later, Bronstein is still photographing little girls living with the impacts of wars they had nothing to do with.

Paula Bronstein’s exhibit “A World in Turmoil” is on display at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan, France, until September 15.