PHOTOS: The Hidden World Of Afghanistan's 'Black Widows'
Pushed to the fringes of society, widows and single mothers band together to create a life for themselves and their children. Photographer Kiana Hayeri captures their daily struggles.
In 2015, Kiana Hayeri was living in Kabul and noticed something strange. She was helping her roommate, an Australian TV producer, with a script translation. The main character, a mother of three who divorces her abusive husband, was always described in a way that referred to a male relative.
There was no word in Dari, a language spoken in Afghanistan, to describe a single woman. "They are fighting against a culture that doesn't even recognize them," says Hayeri, a Tehran-based photographer.
She went back to Afghanistan a year later to document single women in Kabul, the capital, and Herat, a city in the west. In July, the work earned her a in documentary photography from the International Academic Forum, a
