Kurdistan Book - Susan Meiselas

Mass Graves

Street Photographs

Western Archive

Repratriation

Book & Website

Saddam Trial

Exhibitions & Workshops

Transformation

In the present work I've tried to re-create the Kurds' encounter with the West and ask readers to engage in the discovery of a people from a distant place without knowing exactly where that process will lead. In no way is this a definitive history of the Kurds. Texts and images are presented as fragments, to expose the inherent partiality of our knowledge. This is a book of quotations, with multiple and interwoven narratives taken from primary sources -- the raw materials from which history is constructed.

-S.M. from "Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History"

Cover of Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, 1997

Spread from Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, 1997

Excerpts from diaries and documents make public what was often a personal record or private exchange. Suggesting the randomness by which history gets made, newspaper clippings and selected bits of memoirs reveal what was presented by the media and commonly believed at the time. Rather than emerging as a completed puzzle with every piece fitting neatly together, this book project has revealed a mosaic -- only from a distance is there a shape to discern. This is a reconstruction based on what remains and has been retrieved; we cannot know what is gone. Certainly, much is missing.

-S.M. from "Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History"

Spread from Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, 1997

The site akaKurdistan functioned as an extension of the book project and a borderless space, providing the opportunity to build a living, collective memory with a people who have no national archive. Unidentified photographs, unearthed during research for the book and pictures submitted by internet viewers, were presented alongside the stories behind the images.