Kurdistan was erased from world maps after World War I, when the victorious powers carved up the Middle East, leaving the Kurds without a homeland. Today the Kurds, who live on the land that straddles the borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, are by far the largest ethnic group in the world without a state.
Kurdistan is a visual history of a people and a place who have otherwise been denied a national archive. Since its first publication in 1997, Meiselas’s lavish compendium of photographs and documents has become a crucial repository of memory for the Kurdish community both in exile and at home. This new edition appears at a time when the world’s attention has once again been drawn to the lands of this little-understood but historically consequential people.
Read the press release.