Some Kurds know a lot about those who passed through their lands over the past century. The names of Western travelers, missionaries, military officers, and colonial administrators float among the names of their own Kurdish heroes...Other Kurds told me that they had read some of the Western memoirs written about them. Dusty books, sparsely illustrated, long out of print, were taken off back shelves in their homes and proudly shown to me as treasured accounts. Thumbing through the pages, I thought about all the photographs that had been made and then taken away from Kurdistan...I began to wonder where those early photographs were, imagining the route of their travel -- carried by hand as glass or nitrate negatives, or shipped in trunks -- to be pasted into albums or relegated to archives, or to disappear into attics.

In Western archives, the word "Kurdistan" is rarely indexed. The Kurds are catalogued according to the countries in which they live as minorities; most often they appear in archival indexes as "ethnic types." In each collection the classification varies; the photograph is seen as ethnographic description or aesthetic object, especially if it was made by a renowned photographer. Rarely is there any historical information about the people who are pictured and then categorized. But the image still stands as evidence of the encounter.

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