I am just done with edit of a photo shoot in Daratoo and Kasnazan collective towns close to Erbil. This is a comment on the collective towns by Dr. Francesca Recchia:
“During the 1970s and the 1980s the Ba’athist regime in Iraq proceeded to a massive displacement of people from the villages mountainous areas down to the valleys in the northern region of Kurdistan. The Iraqi government designed mujamma’a or Collective Towns where these people would be relocated. The planning of Collective Towns initially responded to a logic of rationalisation and cost-effectiveness, but was successively turned into one of the political tools that the regime of Saddam Hussein used to manage the tensions with the Kurdish population of Iraq.”
and these are the pictures:
Polaris photographer, Newsha Tavakolian, is a very nice friend of me. She has got an assignment to cover Iran’s presidential elections June 2009, for The New York Times. You can see some of her photos here. The Times’ very useful Lens Blog has also done an interview with her. I recommend you to read this interview and I wish Newsha best of luck and further success. Actually I loved that I opened my blog with a post about her.