There are peoples whose history is made of borders drawn by others, of forbidden languages, of identities that resist against all odds. Kurdistan is one of these places, or rather one of these non-places, because Kurdistan as a state does not exist, divided for over a century among four different nations. It was 1916 when the European powers split Kurdistan between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Since then, the thirty million Kurds scattered across these territories have never stopped fighting for a cultural identity that someone has always tried to erase.

It is from this open wound that Shadows of Kurdistan was born, the project by Kurdish photographer Murat Yazar, a body of work that digs into the depth of Kurdish culture and the complexity of its political situation, in a present marked by civil war in three of the four countries that this territory is divided among.

Yazar’s images don’t tell only the story of conflict. They show what could be lost if peace never comes, but they also show that war is not all the Kurdish people have to offer the world. Behind the political tensions, there is a full daily life, a vibrant culture that continues to exist despite decades of forced assimilation, despite the ban on speaking their own language or studying their own history.

«For us Kurds, peace is like the story told by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot», says Yazar. A wait that has lasted a century, set against a strong and deep cultural heritage that the photographer tries to render through his work, spanning culture, daily life, political situation and landscapes of Kurdistan.

To do this, Yazar chose an approach of slow journalism. There are no stolen shots, only images born of months spent in these territories, inside the communities, capturing the nuances of each individual reality. A way of working that gives the photographs a depth that would otherwise be hard to achieve, and that turns Shadows of Kurdistan into a project as political as it is human, an attempt to tell the story of Kurdish cultural identity not to divide, but to build understanding between peoples.

«Human history can be told in many different ways», says Yazar. «With this project, my goal is to show and talk about Kurdistan through photography».