I look at a lot of different photo essays online. A lot. A few every day, at least, to try and learn from what others are doing and see where I can take my work.

Few make as much of an impact on me as The Hidden Half, a photo essay in Mother Jones magazine. While it doesn’t dazzle with tricky techniques or saturated color, in terms of effect, it does more than any fancier essay could hope for. Don’t get me wrong, the technique is perfect, but if you’re trying to get what I’m talking about, after looking at this essay on Afghan women, look at this essay. Pretty pictures. But that’s all, just pretty.

I’m only posting a few here, because I hope you’ll go look at the whole essay. It’s work your internet cafe time.

October 9, 2004, saw the first free, democratic presidential election in Afghanistan. In the months prior, the Taliban peppered villages and cities with “night letters” warning women not to vote. In June 2004 a bomb exploded on a bus full of female election workers in Jalalabad, killing three. Still, these four women at a Kabul polling station-and 40 percent of women nationwide-asserted their new right. But, as a Womankind report summarized, “paper rights have not equaled rights in practice.”

Why this photo is amazing: technically, it’s great – there’s the division between the three women in blue and the woman in white from the slightly out of focus foreground. But what’s really amazing is the content, the emotion, captured here: the daily grind of these women, trying so hard, how they have to go somewhere in a back corner to just exhale. The photographer’s intimacy with her subjects is unmistakable, and that’s why the photographer could capture such an amazing image.

The waters of Band-i-Amir Lake are thought to cure many ailments, including infertility. If a woman has not conceived soon after marriage, her husband’s family will often travel for days-by car, donkey, camel, or foot-to bring her here. Most Afghans don’t know how to swim, so the woman is tethered around the waist as she enters the lake. The husband follows behind and, as is the custom, pushes her into the frigid water three times.

There is something so moving about this photo – the amazing landscape, the disorientation and confusing imagery (just what are they doing?), but it all comes together to reveal an aspect of women’s lives in Afghanistan that most people know nothing about.

Inside a Kabul home, a heavy curtain is all that separates a prostitute’s work from her family life. Her 15-year-old daughter also sells herself, but not in the house. Too many men going in and out would alert the neighbors, and that could prove fatal.

Here, the photographer is working with limitations: I assume that the woman pictured didn’t want to have her face shown, but the photographer worked around this. She used the curtain, which serves such a necessary role in this woman’s abode, as part of the photo. The photographer has the curtain do all the talking, and that’s what makes this photo amazing.