At the end of the Gulf War Susan Meiselas, like many photographers, traveled to Northern Iraq to document the Kurdish refugees fleeing the country.

Unlike most photographers though, she did not satisfy herself with reportage pictures. She admitted that she knew nothing about the Kurds and spent the next six years working on what would become her book Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. During her successive visits to Kurdish communities, Meiselas, as she had done to a lesser extent on her previous Nicaragua, became gradually less interested in being only a photographer and took on the roles of the oral historian, anthropologist and researcher. The resulting book is an amazing palimpsest. The overlays of photographic portfolios in black and white and color, Meiselas's diaries, historical summaries, stories written by Kurds, letters, government papers, photo albums from hard-to-access archives of Iran, Iraq and Turkey allow an open-ended, non-linear way of reading, unusual and compelling in large photography books.

It makes perfect sense that Meiselas has produced her own website on the same theme (www.akaKURDISTAN.com), which does not replace the book but allows the reader to interact differently with the material.

Sicilian photographer Letizia Battaglia, whose work was brought to the spotlight when she won the 1987 W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, has lived most of her life in Palermo and started documenting her hometown in the late 1970s. She soon recognized the dark and ubiquitous presence of the Mafia as a driving force and spent the next twenty years documenting it in stark pictures where drama is at its most powerful for being understated. Her work has been compiled by Aperture, N.Y., in the recent Letizia Battaglia. Like Meiselas, Battaglia found the role of the reporter insufficient in view of the blatant corruption and violence that permeates Sicilian society. Unlike her, she decided to step out of photography and in recent years she has become an anti-Mafia politician, putting her life on the line as one of the most powerful public figures in Palermo. But Letizia has decided once again to use photography; this book is a beautiful celebration of her recent comeback.

Carole Naggar