Susan Meiselas speaking to Rudaw's Zinar Shino in Berlin on April 29, 2022. Photo: Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - An American photographer, who had a role in documenting the Anfal genocide committed against the Kurds decades ago told Rudaw on Friday capturing such brutal incidents may not prevent its repentance but could bring “a kind of consciousness for the people to be more sensitized.”
Susan Meiselas, 73, has worked at the nexus of history, politics, ethnography, art, and storytelling through her photographs.
“I’m a photographer who went first to Kurdistan as a photographer to document the Anfal in northern Iraq. I came to become more of a storyteller not just through my own photographs but by collecting the photographs of Kurdish history through all regions I could visit,” Meiselas told Rudaw’s Zinar Shino in Berlin.
Photographs “may not tell the full story, but they are a part of the story. They are fragments of history that become usually viable as time moves on.”
She arrived in the Kurdistan Region in 1991 to document the Anfal genocide. The Anfal campaign, named after the eighth surah in the Quran, was the codename for former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein’s genocide which killed around 182,000 Kurds.
Highlighting the situation in Ukraine, Meiselas said “it feels as if history is repeating [itself].”
“When I’m making photographs as a witness, of let’s say the Anfal, would that prevent another genocide as we see today in Ukraine? I can’t assume that it’ll prevent, but it brings a kind of consciousness to people to be more sensitized,” she added.
Meiselas built an online archive named akaKURDISTAN, which she refers to as “a place for collective memory and cultural exchange.” She also wrote a book titled Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History.
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