With the growing interest in imagery, archives are playing a bigger role, used as a resource to recall and relegitimize a cultural identity; in some cases the Web may be a helpful platform to research a people’s past for those who lived it. Kurdistan was erased from the map after World War I when the Middle East was divided up by the countries that won the war, leaving the Kurdish people without a homeland, the largest ethnic group in the world without their own nation. As a response, Susan Meiselas created a method for the Kurds to crowd-source their own history—and it would become an influential model. After she had gone to northern Iraq to photograph the refugees and mass graves left by Saddam Hussein’s brutal 1988 Anfal campaign of annihilation against the Kurds, she was inspired to seek out and copy photographs and other artifacts of Kurdistan from family albums, official archives, and elsewhere, placing what she found on a website: akaKurdistan.com. The site also solicited work for a visual history from the Kurdish community. Members of the dispersed people were able to com-ment upon and contextualize the imagery, adding their own stories. A subsequent book, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, was published in 1997, with Meiselas’s own photographs included; it was described in the New York Times Book Review as “the family album of a forsaken people, the archive of a nation that has not been permitted to exist.”
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