ARTISANS OF WEAPONS

"Show me a gun, and I will hand you back a perfect copy in ten days."

This is the boast still repeated by the gunsmiths of Dara Adam Khel, the tribal district south of Peshawar that for over 150 years has been home to South Asia's largest black market for handmade firearms.

Here, in the shadow of the Kohat Pass, generations of the local Afridi tribe have practiced the trade since the mid nineteenth century, when, according to local tradition, a deserter from the British colonial army taught the first villagers to forge rifles by hand. The skill has been passed down through generations of gunsmiths ever since, producing replicas of almost every weapon in existence: pistols, Kalashnikovs, shotguns, even pen guns and anti aircraft guns, worked with little more than a lathe, a forge and years of inherited expertise.

Sold at a fraction of the price of the originals, these weapons have historically supplied conflicts well beyond the valley, from the mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in the 1980s to militant groups operating along the Afghan border in more recent years. Government crackdowns have slowed the trade in the last decade, but it remains a living, largely unregulated industry with real consequences for regional stability.

With this series of previously unpublished images, taken in August 2024 inside some of these workshops in southern Peshawar, I set out to document an often overlooked, yet immensely important, reality.