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When Cages Fly

Kiana Hayeri

When Cages Fly

Raya Editorial, 2024

A photobook made inside Herat Women's Prison in Afghanistan, where women who fled violent marriages found a strange kind of freedom. Three chapters with almost no text, a separate booklet, and a middle chapter sealed in a box that you tear open yourself.

€50 incl. VAT where it applies
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Format
Softcover, with a sealed middle chapter and a separate booklet
Size
22.5 × 17.5 cm
Pages
246, plus a 24-page booklet
Images
127 photographs in full colour and tritone
Photographs & text
Kiana Hayeri
Design
Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo / Raya Editorial
Edition
First edition, March 2024
Printed in
Colombia
ISBN
978-1-7380935-0-2

Awards

  • Photography Book of the Year, Pictures of the Year (POY)
  • Shortlisted, Rencontres d'Arles Author Book Award
  • Shortlisted, IPA Photobook Awards
  • Finalist, Lucie Photobook Award
  • Finalist, APhF Pick:24 Book Award

About the book

When Cages Fly began as a story inside Herat Women's Prison in Afghanistan. Many of the women there ended up behind bars after taking drastic steps to escape abusive and violent marriages; for some, prison turned out to be a kind of shelter. Kiana Hayeri's report on them, "Where Prison Is a Kind of Freedom", was first published in The New York Times Magazine and won the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2020.

The book that grew out of it looks at the fine line between freedom and captivity, in a real and in a symbolic sense. It is divided into three chapters with very little text and comes with a separate booklet, so that you shape your own understanding of what you see. At its heart is the middle chapter, sealed inside a box: a symbol of the prison, protected and strangely freeing at once. To reach it, you tear the box open.

127 photographs are printed in full colour and tritone across 246 pages. When Cages Fly was named Photography Book of the Year by Pictures of the Year, was shortlisted for the Rencontres d'Arles Author Book Award and the IPA Photobook Awards, and was a finalist for the Lucie Photobook Award and the APhF Pick:24 Book Award. Designed by Santiago Escobar-Jaramillo for Raya Editorial and printed in Colombia; first edition, March 2024.

Inside the book

Inside When Cages Fly

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