Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson of Picture Projects, launched akaKURDISTAN.with Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas in January of 1998. akaKURDISTAN is an interactive website that invites contributions from Kurds, historians, photographers, archivists and travelers around the world in order to build an online archive of collective memory. Today, there are more than 20 million Kurds worldwide, the largest ethnic population without a homeland. In some countries, Kurds are jailed for speaking their language, or even carrying a photograph revealing their culture. As a result, hundreds of invaluable photographs have been confiscated, destroyed and even buried in backyards.

The borderless space of the World Wide Web allows this dispersed people without a nation, and thus no central archive, to safely and anonymously add their personal stories to Kurdish history. The site is built from initial seed material in the book Kurdistan in the Shadow of History (Random House 1997). The book was the culmination of a six-year effort by Meiselas to collect material from around the world in order to visually represent the complex history of the Kurdish people and includes photographs and historical documents dating from the i88o's to the present.
Even as the book was going to press, letters and photographs continued to stream into her studio from people eager to contribute. In an effort to create an ongoing exchange, Meiselas joined forces with Picture Projects, to build akaKURDISTAN.The site invites visitors to explore photographs and memoirs via a timeline and map; help identify photographs, names and places in the Unknown Image Archive; and add stories to this online collection.
The website is growing as people add their own stories to the archive and the timeline expands accordingly. The Unknown Image Archive is filling with information about images shown there and new images are being added.The first posting in this section came from Oman. A computer workstation has been travelling with a photographic exhibition of material from the book. The workstation provides access to the website as well as the facilities for Kurds within these communities to scan and upload their images to akaKURDISTAN. Partial support of this site was provided by The Rockefeller Foundations' Multi-Media Fellowship and the Internet Regional Program of the Open Society Institute of the Tides Foundation.