Kurdistan, mon ami

Kurdistan, mon ami – The book is a unique document on thirty years of Kurdish history. In March 1991, Lâm Duc Hiên, a humanitarian and war photographer, travelled to Iraqi Kurdistan with the association Equilibre to help the Kurds bombed by Saddam Hussein. For the last ten years, he has been travelling around the region with his box of images, trying to find the people he immortalised in 1991 and 1994. The faces he found, marked by the passage of time, tell the story of a mountainous region where Muslims, Christians, Yezidis, Kakais, Mandeans, Zoroastrians and Jews live side by side. Thirty years on, stories and unlikely encounters are resurfacing. Two men he had photographed would later become presidents. The photographer gets ever closer to people’s faces: ‘I make my portraits as close to people as possible, until I can see myself in their pupils. I see myself in their eyes.