Photographer documents Afghanistan's child marriage crisis under Taliban rule

Elise Blanchard arrived in Perpignan this late summer carrying photographs that cost her something she is still measuring. The 34-year-old photojournalist had spent the spring of 2026 in Afghanistan documenting families who sold their daughters into marriage—a practice that has intensified under Taliban rule. Now, as the Visa pour l'Image festival opens its doors across southern France, her work hangs on the walls alongside exhibitions from photojournalists working in conflict zones worldwide. The festival, running from late August through mid-September, draws practitioners of the craft from across the globe. Blanchard's images are part of that conversation, though she speaks of the assignment in terms that suggest it extracted something from her. "This report destroyed me," she said plainly, without the protective distance that sometimes accompanies such statements.

Her path to Afghanistan was not the straight line of someone who simply decided to become a war photographer. As a student at Sciences Po Paris, Blanchard was assigned to report on refugee camps within France itself. What struck her was the density of Afghan faces, the number of people who had fled and carried their country with them in memory and longing. She listened to their stories, their attachment to a place they could no longer safely inhabit. The work shifted something in her. She began volunteering with unaccompanied minors, young people who had arrived in France alone. Some of them stayed in her apartment. She learned their languages—Pashto, and more fluently, Dari—not as an academic exercise but as a way to meet them where they were.

In 2017, she moved to New York to pursue a master's degree at Columbia University, continuing the same pattern of work and study intertwined. Again, she found herself among Afghan communities in exile, deepening her language skills and taking courses designed to prepare journalists for reporting in active conflict zones. By 2018, she was ready. She moved to Afghanistan itself and remained there for seven years, through the American withdrawal, through the Taliban's return to power, through the closing of possibilities that had briefly seemed to open. She documented the country as it changed, as restrictions tightened, as economic desperation deepened.

The assignment that brought her to Perpignan this year focused on a specific and devastating practice: families, faced with poverty and unable to feed their children, arranging marriages for their daughters to older men, sometimes much older men, in exchange for money or debt forgiveness. The girls involved are children. The transactions are economic. The consequences are permanent. Blanchard photographed these families, these girls, these arrangements. She was present for conversations about the sale of human beings who had no say in the matter.

What distinguishes her work from distant reporting is the seven years she spent in the country, the languages she spoke, the relationships she had built. She was not a stranger arriving to extract a story. She knew people. She understood context. She had watched the country transform. And that proximity, that knowledge, that understanding—it appears to have made the work harder, not easier. The distance that sometimes protects journalists from the full weight of what they witness was not available to her. She saw not abstractions but people she knew, in circumstances she understood deeply.

The Visa pour l'Image festival, which opened on August 29 and runs through September 13, will display her photographs alongside work from photojournalists documenting crises across the world. The exhibition brings international attention to a practice that has accelerated in Afghanistan since 2021, when the Taliban returned to power and economic conditions deteriorated sharply. Child marriage was not invented by the Taliban, but the conditions they have created—poverty, instability, the absence of alternatives—have made it more common, more visible, more desperate. Blanchard's photographs are evidence of that reality. They are also, by her own account, a record of what the work of witnessing such things does to the person who does it.