Joseph Hoyt was a 22-year-old backpacker on the Grecian islands when he first heard of the mountainous peaks and sweltering deserts of Afghanistan. Fresh out of college and armed with savings from a year as a medical orderly, he was in Europe to do what many 20-somethings do: lose, or possibly find, himself in travel.

He didn't think it would become an on-and-off five years of traipsing the Middle East and South Asia. He baby-sat kids in Turkey. He hitchhiked across Iran. He roamed the ancient ruins of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan. A few months in one country and weeks in the next, Hoyt -- an amateur photographer toting a Nikon -- snaked east as far as Singapore. But nothing caught him like Afghanistan.

''It was beautiful. It was untouched. It was safe,'' says Hoyt, 60, of South Miami. ``It was really fun to walk around and engage people. It opens up a whole world to you.''

Camera in hand, he met Uzbek shepherds by mud-and-rock homes, turbaned Kabul bird-sellers, bearded streetside blacksmiths, tired camel drivers and nomad traders of the Khyber Pass.

Kept away in a storage chest for decades, Hoyt recently brought 50 of these black-and-white photos to light for display at the San Francisco Public Library. Afghanistan 1970-1975: Images from an Era of Peace shows that nation prior to the scars that stamp it today: before the Soviet invasion, before the Taliban regime and long before U.S. missiles struck the caves of Tora Bora.

Hoyt, who supplemented his savings while living abroad with sales from Oriental rugs he brought back to the United States, later sold antique ceiling fans from a storefront on Miami's Coral Way. After coming home in 1975 and later marrying, the news of turmoil in his home away from home cemented the fact that he couldn't return. In fact, history is what inspired Hoyt to dig out his film for the public.

''With the invasion of the Russians in '79, I was totally blown away. And with the uprising of the Taliban, we realized it could get worse,'' he says. ``For many years I was despondent to watch what happened in this country because they were such wonderful people I had become friends with.''

He met young boys dressed in western garb, crowded together and giggling while learning to read verses of the Koran. He rode bejeweled, standing-room-only buses from the city to the countryside, crisscrossing the same paths as Alexander the Great, Kushan Buddhists, Muslim Arabs and British colonialists. He stood in awe at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddha statues, which the Taliban destroyed in 2001. He spoke survival Dari and got by with body language, laughs and smiles -- and many cups of warm chai.

''Kabul was full of little hotels that were full of American and European tourists. We were all explorers or vagabonds or seekers -- I guess many people were seeking another meaning of life,'' he says. ``It was a time of upheaval in the United States. If I wasn't in Afghanistan, I might have been off getting drafted.''

It took some high-tech equipment and a push from his wife and friends to get out the prints. With film too ruined for traditional developing, Hoyt used a professional negative scanner and digital image printers, plus a crash course in Adobe Photoshop. It was 2004, Iraq and Afghanistan dominated the news, and he wanted to show the forgotten place he knew. But Hoyt was unsure. Were the photos any good? Would there be an audience?

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