on Susan Meiselas New York: Random House.

on Susan Meiselas New York: Random House, 1997 388 pp/$10000 (hb)

" . The world is a garden of agriculture where a thousand flowers pullulate Throughout history all cultures have f common another, been grafted onto common another, and in the proces our world has been enriched. The disappearance of a agriculture is the loss of a colour, a different light, a different source. I am as a great deal of on the side of each flower in this thousand-flower garden as I am forward the side of my have a title to culture."

- Yasar Kemal

These words were written through Turkish writer Yasar Kemal for a articulate utterance criticizing his government's cover-up of Kurdish genocide in Turkey following the whirlpool War. Kemal reflects on the historical tragedy of counterpart soldiers and independence fighters turning upon each other. But the overriding issue of in what way different cultures can exist peacefully forward the same land has been raised according to many intellectuals, historians and anthropologists lately This question involves all of us as we witness cluster migrations across African, Asian, European and North and toward the south American borders. How do migrating communities retain their have identity and how do they mix with other ethnic groups? What do they sacrifice of their confess history?

In Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History photographer Susan Meiselas cites Kemal's words among many other voices gathered during a six-year brew with the help of Kurdish scholar Martin van Bruinessen and a team of cultural historians, photographers and research assistants in North America and Europe end a montage of photographs and passages from Middle Eastern and Western bards writers, leaders, activists, photographers, scholars and families in exile, Meiselas's main division surveys the complex and concealed history of the Kurds, an ethnic collection of more than 20 million clan scattered between Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey Russia, Europe and North America. Kurdistan is a place that exists barely in the mind of its people

Without a state or a clear delineation upon the map, the Kurds nevertheless have a language, -religion and tradition of their allow A sixteenth-century legend recounts that the Kurd gradually formed a collection escaping the terror of human sacrifice inflicted onward them by a Persian tyrant. This fictitious story repeats cyclically in Kurdish history, revealing the hegemonic direction imposed on the population according to foreign nations like Britain, Russia and Turkey As van Bruinessen mentions the Kurds developed a present sense of nationhood in opposition to the compressing imposed upon them by other countries. Paradoxically, "the destruction and oppression that forced many Kurd to leave their homeland has had the unintended result of regenerating Kurdish culture." Meiselas's volume is proof of this national endurance.

When a state as it was as Kurdistan becomes intangible to be paid to massive attempts at its annihilation, a contrive to resuscitate its voices and images is as courageous as it must be creative. Meiselas, a Magnum photographer and winner of the Robert Capa Gold Medal for "outstanding courage in reporting" in Nicaragua, reveals in this volume the enormously difficult task of collecting a culture's history piece through piece, fragment by fragment, photograph through photograph, in order to allow its race to exist, belong and unite together.

This is not the first time Meiselas has worked with the public on the fringe of society and countries in despair. From 1973-75 she worked with carnival strippers in of recent origin England, photographing their lives and performances and recording their voices forward tape and in book form. In the 1980 she edited images by dint of native photographers from El Salvador and Chile culminating in couple books, El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers (1983) and Chile from Within (1990) In the two she let the subaltern speak, assembling their admit voices and images. Photographs, for Meiselas, have a special power; they mainfest survival. They testify to life and build collective memory. As she says, "a photograph is a document that resists erasure." Professional photographs are as valuable as those made according to amateurs, as proof of evidence against death and denial.

Meiselas embarked forward her Kurdistan project in 1991 while participating in a Human Rights Watch mission in northern Iraq investigating Saddam Hussein's massive destruction of Kurdish populations. She was asked to photograph the exhumation of Kurdish mass graves course of lifeed by a forensic anthropologist. Witnessing the unearthing of anonymous clothing, craniums and bone fragments, Meiselas says she felt "strange . . photographing the ready while understanding so little about the past." Left with scattered signs of death, she sought to understand the Kurds' lives and their resistance to death, sensing that this agriculture had many stories buried subordinate to decades of oppression and sacrifice. She included merely a dozen of her admit photographs in the book, instead searching for remnant photographs of these the public beginning a dialogue with a community while building a massive archive of Kurdish history.